Samuel Beckett

The author of Waiting for Godot:

1) worked for the French Resistance during WWII;

2) would rather have been a pilot ("I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.);

3) was once stabbed by a French pimp... called Prudent;

4) and had his mother foot the bill for his psychotherapy (perhaps he had more of a sense of humour than one imagines).

[Thanks to The New Yorker]