I have a slight problem with Beckett. I think some of it is fantastic. I always remember there was a French magazine that asked writers, why do you write? And Anthony Burgess wrote three pages. Beckett said, Good only for that. And I thought that was very funny and very true and quite essentially Beckett. It���s even better in French: Bon qu���a ��a. But sometimes I feel, however much he tries to get rid of the rhetoric because he associates it with ���Irishness��� and so on, nevertheless, he can���t avoid it. And it remains a performance. I think in the late plays, which I love, and the late fiction, that sort of disappears really. I think in a lot of the earlier things, there���s this wonderful, enjoyable sense of performance, but in the end, that keeps me at bay. So I have a slightly more ambivalent attitude to it. But his letters are wonderful and always so interesting, and what I treasure in all art, I think, is a complete genuineness. He���s not going to be beholden to anyone.

Maybe I���m either more optimistic or more sentimental than him, I don���t know. But when looking at late Stevens and late Beckett, who have a lot in common ��� I explore that a bit in that book Forgetting ��� in the end, Stevens is willing to recognize a sense of joy at moments in his life. Whereas Beckett feels any sign of that is false, and wants to crush it as soon as he becomes aware of it. And I suppose I feel more at ease with Proust and Stevens on that. I feel, in my life, that is something I want to leave a space for. Beckett, for whatever reason, I think was always suspicious of it. He can���t take it. He doesn���t want it. And even in some of those late pieces of fiction where he goes back to his childhood, he then has to knock it down. As he did in Krapp���s Last Tape. So it���s always been a thing with him. Can���t allow it. Can���t allow it. That���s false.

Gabriel Josipovici, interviewed