I'm A Hopeless 19th-century Romantic.

All I Wanted Was To Be Left Alone. They Abhor A Vacuum, Other People. You Find A Quiet Corner Where You Can Hunker Down In Peace, And The Next Minute There They Are, Crowding Around You In Their Party Hats, Tooting Their Paper Whistles In Your Face And Insisting You Get Up And Join In The Knees-up.

What I Was Afraid Of Was My Own Grief, The Weight Of It, The Ineluctable Corrosive Force Of It, And The Stark Awareness I Had Of Being, For The First Time In My Life, Entirely Alone, A Crusoe Shipwrecked And Stranded In The Limitless Wastes Of A Boundless And Indifferent Ocean.

Throughout The 1960s And 1970s Devoted Beckett Readers Greeted Each Successively Shorter Volume From The Master With A Mixture Of Awe And Apprehensiveness; It Was Like Watching A Great Mathematician Wielding An Infinitesimal Calculus, His Equations Approaching Nearer And Still Nearer To The Null Point.

I Have Never Really Got Used To Being On This Earth. Sometimes I Think Our Presence Here Is Due To A Cosmic Blunder, That We Were Meant For Another Planet Altogether, With Other Arrangements, And Other Laws, And Other, Grimmer Skies. I Try To Imagine It, Our True Place, Off On The Far Side Of The Galaxy, Whirling And Whirling. And The Ones Who Were Meant For Here, Are They Out There, Baffled And Homesick, Like Us? No, They Would Have Become Extinct Long Ago. How Could They Survive, These Gentle Earthlings, In A World That Was Made To Contain Us.

The Sentence Is The Greatest Human Invention Of Civilization.