We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while t...here is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head. Shakespeare has perhaps 20 players, and Tennessee Williams has about 5, ...and Samuel Beckett one--and maybe a clone of that one. I have 10 or so, and that's a lot. As you get older, you become more skillful at casting them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The chartered recountants take the thing to pieces and put it together again. They enjoy it. The artist takes it to pieces and mak...es a new thing, new things. He must.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The glutton castaway, the drunkard in the desert, the lecher in prison, they are the happy ones. To hunger, thirst, lust, every da...y afresh and every day in vain, after the old prog, the old booze, the old whores, that's the nearest we'll ever get to felicity, the new porch and the very latest garden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that a...ny attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success and failure on the public level never mattered much to me, in fact I feel more at home with the latter, having breathed de...ep of its vivifying air all my writing life up to the last couple of years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that's all I ...can manage, more than I could.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »