News at Eleven: [Samuel Beckett] writes, with great difficulty and doubt,

difficult and doubtful poems. He alternates between self-laceration and cockiness. He is profoundly alienated, not least because he inhabits a world of rejection slips, indefinite longings, extreme aesthetic sensitivity and (in the words of a friend) "passionate nihilism." He is moody. A flâneur as well as a great hill-walker, he is given to "St. Germainizing" and to the company, actual or potential, of Sartre and Djuna Barnes and Kandinsky. His creativity is a source of torment because, although he is a genius, as yet he lacks the wherewithal to bring his vocation to satisfactory fruition. He is, in short, waiting.

from The New York Times: I'll Go On

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