Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Samuel Beckett 1906-1989

Photo credit:  Jane Bown (from a postcard)
Irish, lived in Paris, won the Nobel prize in 1969. Outlook: bleak. He wrote "there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."

When an interviewer remarked, as they walked in a park, that it was "the sort of day that makes one glad to be alive," Beckett demurred, "Oh, I don't think I would go quite so far as to say that."

He and his wife are buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. He stipulated that their gravestone "could be any color, so long as it's grey"