I have this fantasy. I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right.

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 think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

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

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

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

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.