I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvellously finished pavilion of the self.

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.

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.

The Booker Prize is a big, popular prize for big, popular books, and that's the way it should be.

We artists love to talk tough, but we're just as sentimental as everyone else when it comes down to it.

Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it.