My Favourite - Samuel Beckett
In the “Three Dialogues” he wrote with Duthuit in 1949, he claimed to favor “the expression that 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.”
(This is from a review by Denis Donoghue in the Sunday NYT today of the most recent collection of Samuel Beckett’s letters. The italicized words are Beckett’s. Two things are striking: the “obligation to express” is what Beckett might have called the ‘hypothetical imperative’ or what keeps the characters in Waiting for Godot going; the second is that the sentence sounds like it could have been written by Gertrude Stein.)
