Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.
It’s always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you’re going.
When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.
Every dogma has its day.
There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters.
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?
Hitler was a teetotalitarian.
Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.
It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.
Delimitation is always difficult. The world is one, life is one. The sweetest and most heavenly of activities partake in some measure of violence – the act of love, for instance; music, for instance.
I chart a little first-list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren’t overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.
We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.
Well, well, well, well. If it isn’t fat, stinking billygoat Billy-Boy in poison. How art thou, thy globby bottle of cheap, stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly thou.
Life is, of course, terrible.
The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities.
The purpose of education is to fit us for life in a civilised community, and it seems to follow from the subjects we study that the two most important things in civilised life are Art and Science.
If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange – meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.
Literature is all, or mostly, about sex.