Buried in Lava: The World According to Samuel Beckett
"To be buried in lava and not turn a hair, it is then a man shows what he is made of. To know he can do better next time, unrecognizably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing there is not, there is a thought to be going on with."
--Malone Dies
"[Beckett] seems to inhabit a realm where other people are not particularly necessary. He obviously hasn't any need to relate to anyone."
--William S. Burroughs
"We are all adrift. We must invent a world in which to survive, but even this invented world is pervaded by fear and guilt. Our existence is hopeless."
--Samuel Beckett
"Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often in silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself. Joyce sat in his habitual posture, legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep of the lower; Beckett, also tall and slender, fell into the same gesture. Joyce suddenly asked some such question as 'How could the idealist Hume write a history?' Beckett replied, 'A history of representations.'"
--Richard Ellmann
"Beckett is quite literally inhuman. You will look in vain for human motivations of jealousy, hate or love. Even fear is absent. Nothing remains of human emotions except weariness and distress, tinged with remote sadness."
--William S. Burroughs
"The sea, the sky, the mountains, and the islands closed in and crushed me in a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go on."
--The End
"Let me say before I go any further that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life and then the fires and ice of hell and in the execrable generations to come an honoured name."
--Malone Dies
“His writing is not about something. It is the thing itself.”
—Samuel Beckett on James Joyce, quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, 1993