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

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.

Everything is what it is, that's all. If we keep attaching meanings and mysteries to everything we perceive, everything we see that is, and to everything that goes on inside us, we are bound to go crazy sooner or later, I thought.

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

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

Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.