Quotes
Quotes about End
If you write fiction you are, in a sense, corrupted. There's a tremendous corruptibility for the fiction writer because you're dealing mainly with sex and violence
Create your characters, give them a time and place to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of action on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temparament with which you have endowed them
The characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose on them; they want to go their own way. They do not even want the book to come to an end
A professor can spend his life unknotting the problems that Joyce probably sardonically knotted for the professor's benefit
Keep away from physicians. It is all probing and guessing and pretending with them. They leave it to Nature to cure in her own time, but they take the credit. As well as very fat fees.
They must have known of my antipathy to even the simplest of engines, and even perhaps of the tendency of all engines in my presence to grow shy, confused, inefficient, even self-destructive
If Joyce is concerned with recording the highness of life, Beckett is obsessed with rendering its mysery. This is not perverseness, the deliberate grinding of the bad tooth; it is rather an attempt to discover what man is really like when he is stripped to show his essential condition, which is one of struggle against unheroic odds
Circle is circle, proves nothing, makes nothing, swallows up process and end in no argument, brings new picture of old time.
In my head a cloud of gloom dripped dew on my individual doom and an endless nightmare vista
Bankruptcy sits beside us, walks the strees, takes coffee in the cafe, chats and eats, a trusted friend, who never lets you down
Immediate danger. Let danger always be immediate. It is a sound thesis. Let us defend ourselves before we are attacked
There are times ... when drunkeness attacks the universe of the spirit. The balance of good and evil is very noticably distrubed, and while some fear the end of all things, others rejoice in the belief that a new age is coming
He had pretended to nothing except the fitting of words like gloves to a story
Gods and goddesses did not, after all, descend; they were immanent but rarely willing to emerge, they made themselves blind that they might not find a door too easily. But when they did find a door they might burn up the globe
Death would endeavour, in its gloom way, to keep things serious
If the end is to come, let us have it, and not have the fiends of time at their game
We must not confuse the future with eternity. Eternity is not an endlessly prolonged future, it is a timeless state that wraps itself about time and, in odd places perceived chiefly by the holy, nibbles at it
Knowledge is no friend of love
The poets had always had words ready for the end of the world
The great past was dead and the endless future would be thin and mean and unloving
God gave his creatures the most tremendous endowment, the thing most like his own essence - I mean freedom of choice. If he knows in advance what his creatures are going to do, then he's denying them freedom. So he deliberately blacks out foreknowledge. God could know, if he wished, but out of respect and love for his creatures, he refuses to know. Can you imagine a more awesome gift than this - God denying himself out of sheer love?
Are we to be no more than brute beasts howling in perpetual heat? Can we not learn that love of the spirit that transcends the lust of the flesh? Love, love, let us have love
I'm making amends for a wasted life - I'm proud to be contributing to scholarship
Writers in time transfer the mendacity of their craft to the other areas of their lives
Enemies cancel each other out. The great thing, perhaps, is not to have friends
