Quotes About Beckett

Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.

I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

Almost fifty years later, some members of the Resistance group with whom Beckett had gone out on sorties towards the end of hostilities did not know that he had been active earlier with another Resistance group in Paris or that, after the war, he had received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance for his contribution there.

There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.

In regard to absurdism, Samuel Beckett is sometimes considered to be the epitome of the postmodern artist … In fact, he is the aesthetic reductio ad absurdum of absurdism: no longer whistling in the dark, after waiting for Godot, he is trying to be radically silent, wordless in the dark.

There are few poets today who can equal, in their esthetic exploitation of language, in their depth of commitment to their medium, in their range of conceptual understanding, in the purity of their closed forms, the work of Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, Barth, Broch, Gaddis, or Calvino, or any of half-a-dozen extraordinarily gifted South Americans.

Don't wait to be hunted to hide, that was always my motto.

With a play, when the curtain goes up and people are in garbage cans, I know I may admire the idea cerebrally, but it won't mean as much to me. I've seen Beckett, along with many lesser avant-gardists, and many contemporary plays, and I can say yes, that's clever and deep but I don't really care. But when I watch Chekhov or O'Neill--where it's men and women in human, classic crises--that I like.

Fairy tales, before they were sanitized, were very dark, and kids love that. 'Coraline' by Neil Gaiman feels like Beckett for kids. I think there's plenty of room for that. And I think there's a danger of being too patronizing to children, having things too sanitized.

Artemis: Right, brothers. Onward. Imagine yourself seated at a cafe in Montmartre. Myles: In Paris. Artemis: Yes, Paris. And try as you will, you cannot attract the waiter's attention. What do you do? Beckett: Umm...tell Butler to jump-jump-jump on his head? Myles: I agree with simple-toon. Artemis: No! You simply raise one finger and say clearly 'ici, garcon.' Beckett: Itchy what?

Becketts work is an embarrassment to the Void.

Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

We're all Beckett's children. Harold is probably more noticeably influenced by Beckett than I am ... I might be an adopted child.

Beckett's 'Stories and Texts for Nothing' is probably my favorite book.

Beckett was the most thorough of playwrights. He tells you what to do and if you've any humility at all, you'll take his advice.

I'm concerned about the woman you're holding prisoner in there," Beckett said. "Knock three times if you're being held against your will." Phoebe gasped and answered, "I'm fine, too." "Good." Beckett said with a chuckle. "I was afraid I'd have to call the cops on my cop brother.

People often say Beckett is difficult or bleak, but engaging with it is the most life-affirming, uplifting thing. It's his use of language. The music of the words works on your subconscious. You end up deeply moved but don't know why. That's where the magic lies.

It is rare that the feeling of absurdity is not followed by the feeling of necessity.

But he had turned, little by little, a disturbance into words, he had made a pillow of old words, for his head.

According to Beckett's or Kafka's law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.

I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.

I spent a lot of time in college studying theater of the absurd and Beckett and Genet, and then I spent a lot of time after that at 'Gossip Girl' auditions, thinking, 'Wow, I really wasted my money.'

It seems to me that after the second world war, Beckett finally realized he had something to write about.