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".
It signals, in fact, that an artist is getting to the core of what it means to be an artist – as in his often-quoted remarks about "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". Bram van Velde could have been made for Beckett.
"The musical ideal," he called them, "music spontaneous and 'useless,' music that wishes to express nothing".
And now and then the books do illustrate Beckett's dictum 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 accounts, in my case, for the odd tension between writing and laziness which Samuel Beckett describes to a T: "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".
And now a new social network, Knotch, gives people an opportunity to express nothing but opinions, and to do it in a way that leaves little ambiguity about how they feel about a particular topic.
They express nothing, which is her point.
They are concrete rather than abstract, and they express nothing about the mental state of their maker.
Pianists with consummately brilliant technique are all too often featureless people who express nothing but their own perfection.
But while most network executives publicly express nothing but happiness with how things stand since that descent into chaos, unease remains under the surface.
His paintings express nothing at all in their broken and churned fields of colour, in their immutable greys, in their unfocused and mediated depictions of reality.
