"In the first interview with Beckett intended specifically for this book, I said that although I understood perfectly well what he meant when he spoke of a separation between his life and his work, I could not agree that such a separation was as absolute as he claimed. I then quoted some of the images of his childhood in Ireland that appear often in his work, even in his late prose texts: a man and a boy walking hand in hand over the mountains; a larch tree turning green every year a week before the others; the sounds of the stone cutters chipping away in the hills above his home. Dozens of such images could be cited, I maintained, which bridge his life and his work. At this point, Beckett nodded in agreement: ‘They’re obsessional,’ he said, and went on to add several others."
— James Knowlson, Damned to Fame