Samuel Beckett

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

Birth was the death of him.

No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.

Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.

I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.

If I had the use of my body, I would throw it out the window.

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.

Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.

We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.

It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter.

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.

Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.

Habit is a great deadener.

I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.

James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.

Poets are the sense, philosophers the intelligence of humanity.

Do we mean love, when we say love?

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.