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

Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

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

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.

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

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

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.