THOMAS BERNHARD

Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.

The anger and the brutality against everything can readily from one hour to the next be transformed into its opposite.

All of living is nothing but a fervid attempt to move closer together.

Our greatest pleasure, surely, is in fragments, just as we derive the most pleasure from life if we regard it as a fragment, whereas the whole and the complete and the perfect are basically abhorrent.

We must allow ourselves to think, we must dare to think, even though we fail. It is in the nature of things that we always fail, because we suddenly find it impossible to order our thoughts, because the process of thinking requires us to consider every thought there is, every possible thought. Fundamentally we have always failed, like all the others, whoever they were, even the greatest minds. At some point, they suddenly failed and their system collapsed, as is proved by their writings, which we admire because they venture farthest into failure. To think is to fail, I thought.

You've always lived a life of pretense, not a real life-- a simulated existence, not a genuine existence. Everything about you, everything you are, has always been pretense, never genuine, never real.

Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.

We Can Only Exist By Taking Our Minds Off The Fact That We Exist

...He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others.

Arrogance is an utterly appropriate weapon to use against a hostile world, a world in which arrogance is feared and respected, even if, like mine, it's only feigned.

I did not want to be anything, and naturally I did not want to turn myself into a mere profession: all I ever wanted was to be myself.

The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable.

Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.

The thinking man always finds himself in a gigantic orphanage in which people are continually proving to him that he has no parents.

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.

All my life I have had the utmost admiration for suicides. I have always considered them superior to me in every way.

What is ridiculous about human beings, Doctor,' the prince said, 'is actually their total incapacity to be ridiculous

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Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

Lawyers make nothing but confusion...A lawyer is an instrument of the devil. In general, he's a fiendish idiot, banking on the stupidity of people much more stupid than himself, and by God he's always right.

What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.