Throughout the 1960s and 1970s devoted Beckett readers greeted each successively shorter volume from the master with a mixture of awe and apprehensiveness; it was like watching a great mathematician wielding an infinitesimal calculus, his equations approaching nearer and still nearer to the null point.

I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.