James Knowlson > Quotes

“The impression given by Bill and May as a couple was of a marriage that was never seriously under strain but was based on habit as much as on affection, with each of them, increasingly, pursuing his or her own interests: Bill in his business, sport, walking, and playing cards; May in the running of the household, the welfare of her sons, Tullow Parish Church, local events such as dog shows, the garden, her dogs, and a donkey called Kish.67”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

“The punchline of the story relates to an American academic saying of Beckett, 'He doesn't give a fuck about people. He's an artist.' At this point Beckett raised his voice above the clatter of afternoon tea and shouted, 'But I do give a fuck about people! I do give a fuck!”
― James Knowlson, Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett: A Centenary Celebration

“Almost fifty years later, some members of the Resistance group with whom Beckett had gone out on sorties towards the end of hostilities did not know that he had been active earlier with another Resistance group in Paris or that, after the war, he had received the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Reconnaissance for his contribution there.”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

“As a little boy, Samuel became very nervous at night and would only go to sleep with a night-light and his favourite teddy bear. ‘He had a teddy bear called “Baby Jack” and they had brass bedsteads. And it was always tied to the top of the bed, with almost no stuffing left in it at all,’ said Sheila Page.89 These details find their way almost unaltered into Beckett’s account of Jacques Moran Junior in Molloy: My son’s window was faintly lit. He liked sleeping with a night-light beside him. I sometimes felt it was wrong of me to let him humour this weakness. Until quite recently he could not sleep unless he had his woolly bear to hug. When he had forgotten the bear (Baby Jack) I would forbid the night-light.90”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

“Mrs Coote was a good friend of their mother and the source for the ‘small thin sour woman’ who comes to tea to be served ‘wafer-thin bread and butter’ sandwiches in Company.96 Mr Coote was a dedicated, highly professional philatelist and obtained many of Frank’s rarer stamps for him.97 For Beckett remembered his brother as being a much keener collector than he ever was himself.98 Memories of such hours spent browsing, but also bickering, with his brother over their favourite stamps insinuate themselves into Beckett’s mature writing. Jacques Moran asks in Molloy: Do you know what he was doing? Transferring to the album of duplicates, from his good collection properly so-called, certain rare and valuable stamps which he was in the habit of gloating over daily and could not bring himself to leave, even for a few days. Show me your new Timor, the five reis orange, I said. He hesitated. Show it to me! I cried.99”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

“wolves’),111 keeping him alive for many months longer than he could ever have survived without the solidarity of such utterly dissimilar individuals.”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

“The two boys did quite a lot of cycling, playing cycle polo in a field not far from Cooldrinagh, just as their father had done earlier in a team run by a man called Wisdom Healy.110 The scene in Beckett’s novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, where the two brothers go off on their bicycles to the sea, recalls a poignant memory of his childhood: That was in the blue-eyed days when they rode down to the sea on bicycles, Father in the van, his handsome head standing up out of the great ruff of the family towel, John in the centre, lean and gracefully seated, Bel behind, his feet speeding round in the smallest gear ever constructed. They were the Great Bear, the Big Bear and the Little Bear; aliter sic, the Big, Little and Small Bears … Many was the priest coming back safe from his bathe that they passed, his towel folded suavely, like a waiter’s serviette, across his arm. The superlative Bear would then discharge the celebrated broadside: B-P! B-P! B-P! and twist round with his handsome face wreathed in smiles in the saddle to make sure that the sally had not been in vain. It had never been known to be in vain.111”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett

“Beckett has frequently been regarded as an arch ‘miserabilist’. This seems to me to be a misrepresentation of the man and a distortion of his work. Though he was intense and often depressed, the hundreds of letters from which I quote reveal a Beckett whom his friends knew extremely well: a witty, resilient man whose reflex response to adversity was often humour and the determination to go on.”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett

“Joyce took meticulous care with his research, reading books primarily, indeed many people who knew him, including Beckett, have claimed almost exclusively, for what they could offer him for his own writing. Inspired more by disinterested intellectual and scholarly curiosity than Joyce, Beckett’s notebooks show, nonetheless, that he too plundered the books that he was reading or studying for material that he could then incorporate into his own writing. Beckett copied out striking, memorable or witty sentences or phrases into his notebooks. Such quotations or near quotations were then woven into the dense fabric of his early prose. It is what could be called a ‘grafting’ technique that runs at times almost wild.”
― James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett