Samuel Beckett Writing Quotations

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

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.

My dear Tom, Delighted to get your letter. Do write again. This life is terrible and I don't understand how it can be endured.

I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them. *1937

I've tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I'd rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them asexcellent ballplayers, first-rate players. But I'm sure I have contributed to false values--as Stanley Woodward said, "Godding up those ballplayers." The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end.

There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.

James Joyce: His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.