Friday the 3rd
Information and Guide to Anglo-Irish writer Samuel Beckett created and maintained in Dublin, Ireland

"The door is imperceptibly ajar." Thus reads a stage direction in one of Samuel Beckett's plays. One director, endeavoring to honor Beckett's meaning to the letter, labored over this direction for many minutes, painstakingly experimenting with varying degrees of ajarness. Eventually Beckett himself, watching in disgust, strode onto the stage and slammed the door shut. "But it says ajar," the director protested - whereupon Beckett turned on him and snarled, "It also says imperceptibly!"

Soon after Beckett married his long-time companion, Suzanne, their relationship became strained by her jealousy of his growing fame. One day in 1969, Suzanne answered the telephone, listened for a moment, spoke briefly to the caller, hung up, turned to Beckett, and whispered: "Quel catastrophe..."
Who had called? The Swedish Academy - to announce its intention to award Becket the Nobel Prize for literature.

One day Samuel Beckett's friend Walter Lowenfels began to expound upon the human condition. Becket sat patiently for some time - until Lowenfels finally cried out in exasperation: "You sit there saying nothing while the world is going to pieces! What do you want! What do you want to do?"
"Walter," Beckett replied, languidly crossing his legs, "all I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."

Samuel Beckett was once asked to explain the significance of the title character in his masterpiece, Waiting for Godot. "If I knew," he replied, "I would have said so in the play."

"William S. Burroughs was a writer [Samuel Beckett] particularly didn't understand," Grove Press founder Barney Rosset once recalled. "There is a famous anecdote about a meeting between Burroughs and Beckett, which took place in Maurice Girodias's restaurant. I remember sitting next to Sam, while Burroughs, who worshipped Beckett, was explaining to him how you do cut-ups. Beckett said to Bill, 'That's not writing, that's plumbing.'"

The fiercely Irish Samuel Beckett was once asked by a French interviewer, "You are English, Mr Beckett?" - and famously replied, "Au contraire!"

"We only printed something like a thousand copies, and the first year it sold about four hundred," Grove Press founder Barney Rosset recalled of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. "It wasn't until the play was produced on Broadway a couple of years later - with Bert Lahr playing Estragon - that the book started to sell, though the production only lasted six weeks in New York. The audience walked out and Walter Winchell denounced it as the new Communist propaganda. But that production made it famous." How many copies of Godot did Grove end up selling? "Well over two million."