- Without the possibility of suicide, I would have killed myself long ago.
- What every man who loves his country hopes for in his inmost heart: the suppression of half his compatriots. [from "History & Utopia"]
- Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone. [from "The Trouble with Being Born"]
- Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind. [from "A Short History of Decay"]
- Chaos is rejecting all you have learned, Chaos is being yourself. [from "A Short History of Decay"]
- We are afraid of the enormity of the possible. [from "A Short History of Decay"]
- A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: He remains on this side of his talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity. [from "The Trouble with Being Born"]
- He who has never envied the vegetable has missed the human drama. [from "The Fall Into Time"]
- Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home? [from "Tears and Saints"]
- Utopia is the grotesque en rose, the need to associate happiness - that is, the improbable - with becoming, and to coerce an optimistic, aerial vision to the point where it rejoins its own source: the very cynicism it sought to combat. In short, a monstrous fantasy. [from "History & Utopia"]
- Man is a robot with defects. [from "The Trouble with Being Born"]
- The aspiration to 'save' the world is a morbid phenomenon of a people's youth ? [from "A Little Theory of Destiny"]
- Splendid, divine morning in the Luxembourg Gardens. Watching people as they came and went, I said to myself that we the living (the living!) walk this earth only for a brief time. Instead of looking at the faces of passers-by, I looked at their feet, and they all became for me only their footsteps, which went in every direction, making a disorderly dance not worth lingering on. While thinking of this, I looked up and saw Beckett [Samuel Beckett], this exquisite man whose mere presence has something so salutary about it. The operation on his cataract, performed on just one eye for now, was a great success. He's beginning to see in the distance, which he hadn't been able to do until now. "I"ll end up by becoming an extrovert," he told me. "It will be up to your future commentators to explain why," I replied. [from his diary "Cahiers 1957-1972", 20 November 1970]
- Beckett [Samuel Beckett] wrote to me about my book 'Démiurge', "In your ruins I find shelter." [from his diary "Cahiers 1957-1972", 21 April 1969]
- At a rehearsal of 'La dernière bande' [English title: 'Krapp's Last Tape'], when I said to Mme. B that Sam [Samuel Beckett] was truly despairing and that I was surprised that he was able to continue, to "live," etc., she replied, "There's another side to him." This answer applies, on a lesser scale to be sure, to myself as well. [from his diary "Cahiers 1957-1972", 18 May 1970]
- Spent an evening with the Becketts. Sam [Samuel Beckett] was well and even high-spirited. He told me that he started writing plays by change, because he needed to relax after writing his novels. He didn't think that what he thought of as a distraction or an experiment would acquire such importance. He added, to be sure, that playwriting involves numerous challenges, because you must restrain yourself, which had appealed to him after the great liberty, the arbitrary and limitless freedom of the novel. The theater imposes conventions, while the novel no longer requires obedience to any. [from his diary "Cahiers 1957-1972", 20 February 1970]
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