Estragon: I'm like that. Either I forget right away or I never forget.

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

I still smile it's not worth the trouble any more for a long time now it's not been worth the trouble the tongue spring goes into the mud I stay like this not thirsty any more the tongue goes back into the mouth it closes it has to make a straight line now it's done I've made the image.

I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance. Whenever I read the late work of Goethe or W. B. Yeats I had the impertinence to identify with it. Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right. It’s the best chance I’ve ever had.

All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

You are not satisfied unless form is so strictly divorced from content that you can comprehend the one without almost without bothering to read the other.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.