Some notes from Beckett Remembering:

[Krance on Beckett:] He described his lifelong commitment to writing less and referred to the principle of failure, ‘to write things out, rather than in’.

[Albee, astutely]: I’ve never felt Sam to be a pessimistic playwright. A pessimist does not try to write. The true pessimist wouldn’t take the trouble of writing. Writing is an attempt to communicate, and if you’re a pessimist you say communication is impossible: you wouldn’t do it.

[Bowles, from his Diaries]: He talks of his books as if they were written by someone else. He said that it was the voice to which he listened, the voice one should listen to[….] ‘It is as if there were a little animal inside one’s head, for which one tried to find a voice; to which one tries to give a voice. That is the real thing. The rest is a game.’