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.

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

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

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

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

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

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