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.

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.

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.

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

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.

We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money.

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