Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

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122 - True art has nothing to do with the Cartesian clear and distinct and that ultimately it tires in the murky waters of the inexplicable.
146 - Coherence, artifice, unity were regarded by Beckett as belonging to the "chloroformed world" of Balzac's novels, where, he claimed, characters are turned into "clockwork cabbages" on whom the novelist can "rely on their staying put wherever needed or staying going at whatever speed in whatever direction he chooses".
147 - apparently unobtrusive, yet in fact highly manipulative 19th C narrator... the narrator is still very much concerned with an outer reality, of people as well as of place, and, as author, Beckett does not always take account of his own strictures.
148 - The emphasis is as much on the subjective associations that she evokes as on the young woman herself.
167 - This inspired Beckett to think of composing a poem about Swift, describing the process as "poem scum fermenting" and as the "first flicker in the mash-tub" for some time.
182 - With Beckett, writing explores, but it does not explain away.
188 - "The artist who is aware of this (breakdown between subject and object) may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-man's land, Hellespont, or vacuum, accoring as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic, or merely depressed.
189 - "My no-man's land" came to be a phrase that he related to his own work. And in this, the rupture becomes no merely one between subject and object but between man and man, and between man and himself.
231 - From Celine's Death on Credit: "What is essential is not to know whether we are wrong or right - that is quite unimportant. What is important is to discourage the world from concerning itself with us. All the rest is vice."
244 - I am not interested in a "unification" of the historical chaos any more than I am in the "clarification" of the individual chaos, and still less in the anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos. What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc, names dates, births and deaths, because that is all I can know.
269 - "The real consciousness is the chaos, a grey commotion of mind, with no premises or conclusions or problems or solutions or cases or judgements."
352 - "I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, (being) in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knwoledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."
352 - The second common element of major significance to Beckett's own future work was that he would draw henceforward on his own inner world for his subjects; outside reality would be refracted through the filter of his own imagination; inner desires and needs would be allowed a much greater freedom of expression; rational contradictions would be allowed in; and the imagination would be allowed to create alternative worlds to those of conventional reality. What he was rejecting was the Joycean principle that know -ing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it.
357 - The shift to writing in French may have been an important way of escaping from the influence of Joyce. It was also easier, Beckett maintained, to write in French "without style". He did not mean by this that his French had no style, but that, by adoping another language, he gained a greater simplicity and objectivity. French offered him the freedom to concentrate on a more direct expression of the search gor "being" and on an exploration of ignorance, impotence, and indigence. Using French also enabled him to "cut away the excess, to strip away the color" and to concentrate more on the music of the language, its sounds and its rhythms.
371 - "I speak of an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road." In answer to Duthuit's "And preferring what?" Beckett replied memorably: " "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."
372 - In Molloy, clues lead nowhere; plans appear aimless and events lack importance, at least in terms of the plot; meetings are arbitrary and lead to no new developments. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose stories Beckett loved as a boy, would have shuddered at a world so impervious to reason and deductive logic.
376 - ...in a world where neither depth psychology nor any philosophical system will ever manage to explain the inexplicable.
403 - "The notion of happiness has no meaning at all for me any more. All I want is to be in the silence..."
460 - "with the snow and the crows and the exercise book that opens like a door and lets me far down into the now friendly dark."
463 - For what is most essential is the exploration of "being" to which the text is devoted, asking the question what remains when everything superfluous is taken away.
492 - Writing was for him, he said, a question of "getting down below the surface" towards what he described as "the authentic weakness of being". This was associated with a strong sense of the inadequacy of words to expore the forms of being. "Whatever is said is so far from the experience"; "if you really get down to the disaster, the slightest eloquence becomes unbearable". In this he was far removed, he maintained, from the approach of James Joyce; "Joyce believed in words. All you had to do was rearrange them and they would express what you wanted." Beckett never seems to have believed that this was achievable.
497 - ...characters who speak, though apparently dead."
521 - Alan Schneider on the plot of "Film": "It's a move about the perceiving eye, about the perceived and the perceiver - two aspects of the same man. The perceiver desires like mad to perceive, and the perceived tries desperately to hide. Then, in the end, no one wins.
532 - The fascination of this text comes from the way in which the imagination shifts its own position in relation to these various elements, going in, moving out, ascending, examining, descending and returning inside the rotunda like some versatile, miniature camera eye.
602 - Some of Beckett's most cherished themes: an absence of an identifiable self; man forced to live a kind of surrogate existence, trying to "make up" his life by creating fictions or voices to which he listens; a world scurrying about its business, ignoring the signs of decay, disintegration and death with which it is surrounded. Yet if all this sounds deeply sombre, even pessimistic, there remains a strongly positive impulse to confer form on such concerns. Form (and here poetry) has become a central bulwark, perhaps even providing a readon for the need to express, the sources of which Beckett genuinely never seems to have understood.
607 - "It is a game, everything is a game... That has got to be done artificially, balletically. Otherwise everything becomes an imitation, an imitation of reality... It should become clear and transparent, not dry. It is a game in order to survive.
631 - Beckett said there was only on them in his life: "To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self."
632 - "Neither" begins "to and fro in shadow/ from outer shadow to inner shadow/ from impenetrable self to impenetrable un-self/ by way of neither"
632 - From Kleist's "On the Marionette Theater": Puppets possess a mobility, symmetry, harmony and grace greater than any human dancer can possibly achieve, because they lack the self-consciousness that puts human beings permanently off balance
633 - Again from Kleist: The bear represents, symbolically, the creature without awareness of self, who, as a result, is able to respond naturally and unselfconsciously to the thrusts of the fencer and not be deceived by what are only false passes. Further, in parrying the actual thrusts, the bear does what he has to do with the strictest economy and the maximum of grace.
653 - The scepticism that he had brought to his criticism of the role of memory in Proust (involuntary as well as voluntary) had been reinforced by the distance that separated him from his own past. Memory emerges here as very much like invention.
671 - ...emotions are strictly contained but never totally abandoned.
680 - It is often forgotten that Beckett's work is as much about persisting and continuing as it is about ending.