Samuel Beckett Quotes

Let's go." "We can't." "Why not?" "We're waiting for Godot.

I wait for options, hoping that a space for a pass will appear at the last moment.

I stand here waiting. To disappear or sing.

I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.

I have always found it difficult to wait for things - whether it was to see my father or sailor brother, Alan, again after their long sea trips, or the chance of a better job, or even new curtains.

As a kid, I loved 'Godot' because of the poetry and the humor and the strangeness, but then as you get older, it's much more resonant.

Godot is whatever it is in life that you are waiting for: 'I'm waiting to win the lottery. I'm waiting to fall in love'. For me, as a child, it was Christmas. At least that eventually came.

In so far as I have any beliefs, I suppose I'm like that old Peggy Lee song, 'Is That All There Is?' I want to believe there's something else going on, but what that something else is I don't pretend to know.

I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

Since I came at 'Godot' from a God-based frame of mind, it didn't strike me as absurdist. It struck me as characters waiting for proof of God's existence.

Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot,' billed as 'the laugh sensation of two continents,' made its American debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, in Miami, Florida, in 1956. My father, Bert Lahr, was playing Estragon, one of the two bowler-hatted tramps who pass the time in a lunar landscape as they wait in vain for the arrival of a Mr. Godot.

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.

Samuel Beckett. He is a kind of hero for me.

My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.

Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour.

I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.

Life is always rich and steady time when you are waiting for something to happen or to hatch.

One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.

If there's no meaning in it," said the King, "that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any. And yet I don't know," he went on [...]; "I seem to see some meaning in them, after all.

Every day brings a ship, Every ship brings a word; Well for those who have no fear, Looking seaward well assured That the word the vessel brings Is the word they wish to hear.

Maybe I'll be like that man in "The Hanging Tree'. Still waiting for an answer.

Waiting is the hardest work of hope.

Things will be far worse than they are now. And far better. I wait.

I think I'll just go down and have some pudding and wait for it all to turn up - it always does in the end.