Samuel Beckett Art Quotations

Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.

My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art.

I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.

We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties.

The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint.

No painting is more replete than Mondrian's.

The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, and more than the light of day (or night) makes the subsolar, -lunar, and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon, and stars of the mind, the whole mind.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment.

We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?

There is at least this to be said for mind, that it can dispel mind.

Art has always been this--pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric--whatever else it may have been obliged by social reality to appear.

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.

An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as reportage.

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead.

The dust will not settle in our time. And when it does some great roaring machine will come and whirl it all skyhigh again.