Thomas Bernhard Quotes

It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad.

Instead of committing suicide, people go to work.

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.

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

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

People keep a dog and are ruled by this dog, and even Schopenhauer was ruled in the end not by his head, but by his dog. This fact is more depressing than any other.

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

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.

After all, there is nothing but failure.

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.

You are never truly together with one you love until the person in question is dead and actually inside you.

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

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

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

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

Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould... I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

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

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

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

We only really face up to ourselves when we are afraid.

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

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.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

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

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

everything is ridiculous if one thinks of death

perfidious society masturbators

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

I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself.

We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money.

I had to spend my entire childhood in the Altensam dungeon like an inmate doing time for no comprehensible reason, for a crime he can't remember committing, a judicial error probably.

A criminal is undoubtedly a poor soul, who is punished for his poverty.

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

Almost everybody we get together with about a matter, even if it is of the highest importance, is incompetent.

I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs.

He wanted to be an artist, an artist of life wasn't enough for him, although precisely this concept provides everything we need to be happy if we think about it.

We always look for everything in the immediate proximity, that is a mistake.

When we do something, we may not think about why we are doing what we are doing, says Oehler, for then it would suddenly be totally impossible for us to do anything.

There is nothing more dreadful than having to go walking on one’s own on Monday.

The whole process of life is a process of deterioration in which everything—and this is the most cruel law—continually gets worse.

Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.

To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glen in One... Glen Steinway, Steinway Glen, all for Bach.