The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, as Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitutes the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptions (because by no expedient of macabre transubstantiation can the grave sheets serve as swaddling clothes) represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. [19]

Friendship, according to Proust, is the negation of that irremediable solitude to which every human being is condemned. Friendship implies an almost piteous acceptance of face values. Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets. It has no spiritual [63] significance. For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. ... Proust situates friendship somewhere between [64] fatigue and ennui. [65] The only fertile research is excavatory, immersive, a contraction of the spirit, a descent. The artist is active, but negatively, shrinking from the nullity of extracircumferential phenomena, drawn to the core of the eddy. He cannot practise friendship, because friendship is the centrifugal force of self-fear, self-negation. [65-66]

‘[I]t is indeed becoming more and more difficult, even senseless, for me to write an official English. And more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn part in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. Grammar and Style. To me they seem to have become as irrelevant as a Victorian bathing suit or the imperturbability of a true gentleman. A mask. Let us hope the time will come, thank God in certain circles it has already come, when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute[,] to bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - I begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today. Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting? At first it can only be a matter of somehow finding a method by which we can represent this mocking attitude towards the word, through words. In this dissonance between the means and their use it will perhaps become possible to feel a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All. With such a program, in my opinion, the last work of Joyce has nothing whatsoever to do. [...] from time to time I have the consolation of sinning willy-nilly against a foreign language, as I should love to do with full knowledge and intent against my own.’ Disjecta, London: John Calder 1983, pp.171-72; quoted in Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett, Repetition, Theory and Text, 1988, p.17; cited in Mark Harman, 'Obsessive Fantasies: Beckett and Kafka’, Beckett and Beyond, ed. Bruce Stewart, Colin Smythe, 1998.)

What is art?
‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, together with the obligation to express’ (p.103.)
[...]

‘My case, since I am in the dock, is that van Velde is the first to desist from this estheticised automatism, the first to submit wholly to the incoercible absence of relation, in the absence of terms or, if you like, in the presence of unavailable terms, the first to admit that to be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.’ (Rep. in Ruby Cohn, ed, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, London: John Calder 1983, pp.138-45; p.126.)

‘It would be impertinent for me to advise you about the article you are doing and I don’t intend to. But when it comes to journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, it’s plenty for us, and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making. My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their own aspirin. Hamm as stated, and Clov as stated, together as stated, nec tecum nec sine te, in such a place, and in such a world, that’s all I can manage, more than I could.’ (Quoted in Alec Reid, All I Can Manage, More than I Could, Dolmen 1969, p.33; also in Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett, 1978, p.397.)

‘[T]he difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material - perhaps the greatest. [...] the kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce know the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don't think ignorance has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression is achievement - must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being which has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - as something by definition incompatible with art.’

‘I realised that Joyce had gone as far as he could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in substracting rather than adding.’ (Quoted in James Knowlson, Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury 1996, p.352.)

‘One must make a world of one’s own in order to satisfy one’s need to know, to understand, one’s need for order … There for me lies the value of the theatre, one turns out a small world with its own laws … .’ (Juliet, ‘Conversations with Samuel Beckett’; cited in Eric Griffiths, review of Peter Brook’s production of Oh Les Beaux Jours, Royal court; in Times Lit. Supplement, 5 Dec. 1997).

[...]

‘For me, the theatre is not a moral institution in Schiller’s sense. I want neither to instruct nor to improve nor to keep people from getting bored. I want to bring poetry into drama, a poetry whcih has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed. I couldn’t give the answers that were hoped for. There are no easy solutions.’ (Quoted in James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Bloomsbury 1996, p.447.)

‘It was [...] easier, Beckett maintained, to write in French “without style”. He did not mean by this thta his French had no style, but that, by adopting another language, he gained a greater simplicity and objectivity. French offered him the freedom to concentrate on a more direct expression of the search for “being” and on an exploration of ignorance, impotence and indigence. Using French also enabled him to “cut away the excess, to strip away the colour”, and to concentrate more on the music of the language, its sounds and its rhythms.’ (James Knowlson, Samuel Beckett: Damned to Fame, London: Routledge, 1996, p.357.)