Samuel Beckett Quotes

I have never sought the reason why I write.

I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something.

I think I'm drawn to writing about something which feels intense and important.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

I ultimately write for myself and the people I love.

I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.

I think without writing I would feel completely useless.

I write to explore something that fascinates me, and I write the way I do because it is the only way I know how to write.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

Never regret what you don't write.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

The big ideas always come in flashes. I don't really craft stories that much. I genuinely don't know where these people come from, and I've often wondered if writing is just a socially acceptable form of madness.

If I don't feel like writing today or for a few days, I don't. And I don't think about it. It is not an obligation-it is the greatest privilege.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two.

It's become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole; of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well.

I had never really thought of myself as a writer; any writing I had done was just to give myself something to draw.

I cannot say that I write with any social objective. One writes because one loves writing, really.

Writing is so entwined with my being that I can't imagine a life without it.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

I never want kids to walk away after a school presentation and say, 'I met a writer today.' I want them to say, 'I am a writer.'

I was always writing for myself. I wrote what I needed to write and hear - that's what makes it powerful.

I really just want to be a writer and a storyteller. But maybe pain is one of the things you have to feel in order to be creative.