With Joyce the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material – perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending toward omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence and ignorance. I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past. My little exploration is that little zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable – as something by definition incomparable with art.

— Beckett, New York Times interview, 1956

Flame of beauty

The people who sang for us were in stripes and there were guards there with shotguns. They were singing under the red hot sun of Texas, people obviously in enormous trouble. But, when they opened their mouths, out came this flame of beauty. This sound which matched anything I’d heard from Beethoven, Brahms, or Dvorák.

– Alan Lomax

In the night it became clear to me

Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child’s lesson book, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place in the nether parts which the higher parts no longer know, when one writes one’s stories in the sunshine.

— Kafka (via here)

Nothing to declare

Waiting for Godot frankly jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books.

Kenneth Tynan

Anxiety

It was funny how anxiety crept up on you just as I turned up, wasn’t it? From the most primitive fears – I can’t leave my room, not while there are still voices in the hall – to the feeling of your bones turning cold for no reason, while walking to class or to the forest.

The call of the work

For the man who sets out to write, the work is in no way a shelter in which he lives, in his peaceful and protected self, shielded from the difficulties of life. Perhaps he in fact thinks he is protected from the world, but he is exposed to a danger much greater and more menacing because it finds him powerless: the very danger that comes to him from outside, from the fact that he remains outside. And against this threat he must not defend himself; on the contrary, he must give in to it. The work demands that, demands that the man who writes it sacrifice himself for the work, become other – not other than the living man he was, the writer with his duties, his satisfactions, and his interests, but he must become no one, the empty and animated space where the call of the work resounds.

— Blanchot, The Book to Come (tr. Mandell)

Sunset is such a sad hour

Kit took Port’s hand. They climbed in silence, happy to be together.
‘Sunset is such a sad hour’, she said presently.
‘If I watch the end of a day – any day – I always feel it’s the end of a whole epoch. And the autumn! It might as well be the end of everything’, he said. ‘That’s why I hate cold countries, and love the warm ones, where there’s no winter, and when night comes you feel an opening up of the life there, instead of a closing down. Don’t you feel that?’
‘Yes’, said Kit, ‘but I’m not sure I prefer the warm countries. I don’t know. I’m not sure I don’t feel that it’s wrong to try to escape the night and winter, and that if you do you’ll have to pay for it somehow.’
‘Oh, Kit! You’re really crazy.’

— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

Hindered

What we couldn’t have achieved if we hadn’t been hindered by each other, if we’d slid into each other without noticing, if we’d grown into one! We’d have slid right into the world, with all its worldly pains and joys. What did you ever want but to feel those pains and joys? Didn’t they seem like child’s play compared to having me around?

A potential life

It’s as if a thread of our potential life were always running under our life. A life that I would have overseen if things hadn’t gone so wrong. A proper life, in which you hadn’t dragged me down, in which we could have cooperated and merged into someone real, someone with continuity, solidity, influence. But we have a real life, we can document it, we’ve got bank statements and tax records.

To be free

I came to you hoping to be healed.
You are my doctor, my saviour, my omnipotent judge, my priest, my
god, the surgeon of my soul.
And I am your proselyte to sanity.

* * *

to achieve goals and ambitions
to overcome obstacles and attain a high standard
to increase self-regard by the successful exercise of talent
to overcome opposition
to have control and influence over others
to defend myself
to defend my psychological space
to vindicate the ego
to receive attention
to be seen and heard
to excite, amaze, fascinate, shock, intrigue, amuse, entertain,
or entice others
to be free from social restrictions
to resist coercion and constriction
to be independent and act according to desire
to defy convention
to avoid pain
to avoid shame
to obliterate past humiliation by resumed action
to maintain self-respect
to repress fear
to overcome weakness
to belong
to be accepted
to draw close and enjoyably reciprocate with another
to converse in a friendly manner, to tell stories, exchange
sentiments, ideas, secrets
to communicate, to converse
to laugh and make jokes
to win affection of desired Other
to adhere and remain loyal to Other
to enjoy sensuous experiences with cathected Other
to feed, help, protect, comfort, console, support, nurse or
heal
to be fed, helped, protected, comforted, consoled,
supported, nursed or healed
to form mutually enjoyable, enduring, cooperating and
reciprocating relationship with Other, with an equal
to be forgiven
to be loved
to be free

— Sarah Kane, 4.48 Psychosis