Quotes from Thomas Bernhard

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.

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.

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.

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.

In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.

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

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

Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.

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

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

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

After all, there is nothing but failure.

He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

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.

I barricaded myself and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness.

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

Ausgerechnet der Mensch ist unmenschlich.

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

After all, there is nothing but failure.