A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

Beckett does not believe in God, though he seems to imply that God has committed an unforgivable sin by not existing.

This truth may be handled either sinfully or profitably; sinfully as when it is treated on only to satisfy curiosity, and to keep up a mere barren speculative dispute.... This point of election... is not to be agitated in a verbal and contentious way, but in a saving way, to make us tremble and to set us upon a more diligent and close striving with God in prayer, and all other duties.

He said it was artificial respiration, but now I find I am to have his child.