In spite of, or rather along with, those exchanges, quips, questions, there were also entire evenings when he didn’t say a word. At such times it was not easy to break the silence; it would have been worse than interrupting an avowal. There’d be a murmur, a shift in position, and someone’s voice slowly breaking the artefact that silence had become. Even though Sam’s was not an aggressive directed against anyone, but rather a sinking into his own private world with its demons, or so we imagined, those present suppressed their acute discomfort and feelings of ineptitude when it happened. His intimate friends learned how to cope with his struggle – A. by talking about a wine he had tasted, the theatre designer Jocelyn Herbert by bringing in a chessboard. I coped by bringing up Dr Johnson, and Con Leventhal. His old friend from Dublin, by retelling a bit of Trinity College gossip. They, or we, coped by doing any of the ordinary things friends do, the more ordinary the better, to bring to an end the fleeting and rather frightening chill.

— Anne Atik, How It Was: A Memoir of Samuel Beckett