Playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett was born in a rich suburb of Dublin, Ireland called Foxrock (1906). His mother was a tall, strict woman, famous in her neighborhood for her short temper. Beckett started rebelling against her at an early age by climbing trees and jumping out of them, spreading his arms to break his fall on the branches.
He moved to Paris and became one of James Joyce's assistants and disciples. He wanted badly to write like Joyce, but he had little success. He was struggling to support himself as a translator and miserable about his failures as a writer, when one day he was attacked and stabbed in the chest by a pimp, the knife barely missing his heart.
Word spread that he was in the hospital, and a surprising number of people came to visit him. He didn't know he had so many friends. James Joyce brought him yellow roses and Nora Joyce baked him a custard pudding. Even the Irish ambassador came. One of his visitors was a French woman named Suzanne who had seen him give a lecture. She later became his wife.
Beckett got involved in the French Resistance during World War II, and he helped transmit secret messages across the boarder in packs of cigarettes. He had been struggling for years to write a novel, and the effort had only made him miserable, so in the midst of the war he decided to try playwriting. He said, "Life at the time was too demanding, too terrible, and I thought theatre would be a diversion."
Beckett never published the first play he wrote, but he began to use playwriting as a way to cheer himself up after he got blocked writing a novel. He was struggling with a new play just after the war was over, so he decided to write another play. As an exercise, he made it as simple as possible: it would be a play about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, waiting for a man named Godot, who never arrives. He finished it in just a few months, faster than he'd ever finished anything he'd ever written. And that was Waiting For Godot (1952), the play in which Beckett wrote, "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"
He didn't have much hope that it would ever be produced, but his wife thought it was a masterpiece, and she showed it to everyone involved with the theater that she could find. It was finally produced in 1953, and became an international sensation.
Samuel Beckett said, "I did not want to write, but I had to resign myself to it in the end."
He also said, "All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."
He also wrote, "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion. It's all around us...the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess."
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor
* All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.
*Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
*Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
*Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
*Habit is a great deadener.
*I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
*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.
*In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.
*James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.
*Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it.
*Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.
*Make sense who may. I switch off.
*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.
*Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!
*Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.
*Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence.
*Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.
*That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
*The bastard! He doesn't exist!
*There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
*They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
*To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.
*We are all born mad. Some remain so.
*We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?
*We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.
*What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.
*Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
*Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
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