Nothing but disaster follows from applause.

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

One day you're cut off, at the very start you're cut off and can't go back, the language you learn and the whole business of walking and all the rest is for the sake of the single thought, how to get back again.

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

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

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.

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.