Via A Piece of Monologue: Thomas Bernhard, from his autobiography, Gathering Evidence:

For long periods I live in isolation, isolated both in mind and in body … Subject to every vagary of my own nature and of the universe — whatever it is — I can get through life only with the help of a precise daily routine. I am able to exist only by dint of standing up to myself — in fact, of consistently opposing myself. When I am writing I read nothing, and when I am reading I write nothing. For long periods I read and write nothing, finding both equally repugnant.

And:

There are long periods when I detest both reading and writing, and then I fall prey to inactivity, which means brooding obsessively on my extremely personal plight, both as an object of curiosity and as a confirmation of everything I am today, of what I have become over the years in circumstances which are as routine as they are unnatural, artificial, and indeed perverse.

Thomas Bernhard, Frost:

He listened to everything I had to say, without a single interruption, even up and down the many detours and byways I took, where there was talk of security and being together and being alone, of lack of self-confidence, of trust, and rebellion and distinctions, of suddenly stopping and going back, of fear and reproach, of love and torment, of deception and self-evidence, where clouds rose up, and heavy snowfalls darkened town and country, where people continually renewed each other, where there was grief after days of exuberance and rivers dragged their courses, where you gradually forgot how to live and found again what had been lost, where silence alternated with excitement, stimulating modesty here and brutality there — things that didn’t resolve themselves, how people walked past each other, not recognizing themselves, fell into silence, and the sayings of sadness, where nights were uselessly waked through and a thousand important days were slept away.

From a 2003 Guardian piece on River Phoenix, on what was then the tenth anniversary of his death at age twenty-three:

“His mother said that she’d been in labour with River for 48 hours,” he recalls, “and that she was convinced he hadn’t really wanted to be born. She thought he had struck some sort of deal so that he wouldn’t have to stay very long on this earth.”

The prince from Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles:

“Probably children are begotten by their parents out of sheer malice and dragged into the world out of the greatest imaginable inconsiderateness.”

Henry from Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing:

“Buddy Holly was twenty-two. Think of what he might have gone on to achieve. I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course.”

“Reading is still the most bearable of all forms of disgust.” Thus the maniacal monologuing prince in Thomas Bernhard’s Gargoyles, lately improving my evenings.

“The cold is inside me,” the prince said. “Therefore it makes no difference where I go; the cold goes along with me inside me. I am freezing from within. But in the library this cold is most bearable. Nothing but brains printed to death,” the prince said. “With every book we discover to our horror a human being printed to death by the printers, a man published to death by the publishers, read to death by the readers.”

I finish Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser yesterday. (Its original German title has a better, less Ace-Venturan ring to it: Der Untergeher. Literally The under-goer, as in The one who goes under or went under.) A great book, obsessive and darkly funny, all bravura brain-voice, and ideal reading material for a weekend spent largely in scowling, seething, and sputtering profanely at one’s computer all the live-long day while in the process of migrating erasing.org to a new web host for the first time in six years, an endeavor that I succeed in making much more headache-inducing than it sounds. The loser who goes under? From the Bernhard book, in Jack Dawson’s translation:

We are, to put it precisely, born into misunderstanding and never escape this condition of misunderstanding as long as we live, we can squirm and twist as much as we like, it doesn’t help. But everyone can see this, he said, I thought, for everyone says something repeatedly and is misunderstood, this is the only point where everybody understands everybody else, he said, I thought. One misunderstanding casts us into the world of misunderstanding, which we must put up with as a world composed solely of misunderstandings and which we depart from with a single great misunderstanding, for death is the greatest misunderstanding of all…