Samuel Beckett Quotes

I feel satisfaction at the end of the day when I've written a scene that I really like or when I write a good line of dialogue that I read out to my wife or something like that. But there's also days where it's just bloody agony and I go, 'ugh, this is such crap! Why did I think I had any talent?

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Being an artist doesn't mean that you're a good artist. That was the bargain I first made with myself: I'd say, I'm an artist, but I'm not really very good.

The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.

Maybe I can't write without painting myself into a corner first.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. the illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life.

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.

Every writer since the beginning of time, just like other people, has been afflicted by what a friend of mine calls

Writing is not hard. Just get paper and pencil, sit down, and write as it occurs to you. The writing is easy-it's the occurring that's hard.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

I'm terribly afraid of failure. When your identity is wrapped up in writing and you've written something that doesn't work, it's a tough pill to swallow.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

I start a book and I want to make it perfect, want it to turn every color, want it to be the world. Ten pages in, I've already blown it, limited it, made it less, marred it. That's very discouraging. I hate the book at that point. After a while I arrive at an accommodation: Well, it's not the ideal, it's not the perfect object I wanted to make, but maybe—if I go ahead and finish it anyway—I can get it right next time. Maybe I can have another chance.

I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke. I've occasionally been criticized over the past couple of years for publicly "complaining" about how difficult drawing comics is, yet I've only mentioned it so that the younger cartoonists who are trying it out and finding it difficult and painful realize that they're not alone. There's not really any set way of learning how to do this, and it's always a struggle to improve, and, more importantly, see accurately whether or not one's work is communicating any shred of feeling or truth at all.

If you write something and they all tell you it is bad - editors, critics, everybody - think it over and you may become convinced that they are right (though you are not to be ashamed or discouraged for a minute, but keep on writing).

I start out to write five days a week, and then it runs to six days and finally seven. Then, eventually, that wave of weariness overwhelms me and I don't know what's the matter. That is, I know but I won't admit it. I'm just tired from writing. As you get older, writing becomes harder. By that I mean you see so many more potentialities. Things like transition used to trouble me. But not any more. When I say it's harder, I'm not talking about facility. You learn all the so-called tricks, but then you don't want to use them.

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

When I'm writing, I'm locking myself in a room. I'm the worst critic in the world. I write something and then I beat myself up. I'm like "Vin, you're retarded, that makes no sense."

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

I write so slowly, I could write with my own blood and not hurt myself.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet; the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.