Thomas Bernhard

"a captivating oddity, a monolithic confession or lamentation, an existential interrogation inhabited with flashbacks, foibles, sickness, death, hallucination, mental aberration, religion and belief […] exquisitely weird" ansgarallen.com/the-wake-and…

Even as a child I avoided multitudes, I detested crowds, the accumulation of people, the concentration of vileness and mindlessness and lies.

I hate nothing more profoundly than the multitude.

I have always detested crowds, I have avoided them all my life.

Museum guides are nothing but conceited art twaddlers who do not have the faintest idea about art but unscrupulously exploit art with their distasteful twaddle.

Museum guides are nothing but conceited twaddling machines.

Unpunctuality is a characteristic of gross negligence, which I despise and detest, which brings nothing but demoralization and misfortune to people.

Admiration... is not just the characteristic of the so-called uneducated, quite the opposite, it is also to a quite frightful, yes, literally a frightening degree, a characteristic of the so-called educated, which is a lot more revolting still.

Because people find respect and esteem too difficult for them they admire, that comes cheaper for them.

Most people are dull-witted all their lives soley because they keep admiring.

Admiration makes a person blind... it makes the admirers dull-witted.

People enter every church and every museum as though with a rucksack full of admiration, and for that reason they always have that revolting stooping way of walking.

Real intellect does not know admiration: it acknowledges, it respects, it esteems, that is all.

Nothing repels me more than observing people in the act of admiration.

You call a good man your friend, and the next thing you know he lets himself be made an honorary professor and from then on calls himself professor and has Professor printed on his notepaper.

Wherever we look today in this country, we look into a sump of ridiculousness.

Everything in the Vatican is ridiculous once you have freed yourself of the Catholic lies about history, Catholic sentimentality about history, of the Catholic officiousness about world history.

The history of the papacy is full of nothing but caricatures.

Most people... are incapable of caricaturing, they observe everything to the bitter end with their terrible seriousness.

In art anything can be made to look ridiculous.

We can only stand a great, important picture if we have turned it into a caricature, or a great man... we have to caricature him.