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

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

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.

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

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.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.