Thomas Bernhard Quotes

I think when you play 'Psychonauts,' you are kind of playing inside of my head.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

And this is the strangest of all paradoxes of the human adventure; we live inside all experience, but we are permitted to bear witness only to the outside. Such is the riddle of life and the story of the passing of our days.

It's hard to find a book that's safe to write. Because one always goes to dark or difficult places.

Good writing, and this is especially important in a subject such as economics, must also involve the reader in the matter at hand. It is not enough to explain. The images that are in the mind of the writer must be made to reappear in the mind of the reader, and it is the absence of this ability that causes much economic writing to be condemned, quite properly, as abstract.

The world that is in me is the only world I have by which to grasp the world outside and as I write fiction, it is the chart by which I must steer.

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head.

The more closely the author thinks of why he wrote, the more he comes to regard his imagination as a kind of self-generating cement which glued his facts together, and his emotions as a kind of dark and obscure designer of those facts. Reluctantly, he comes to the conclusion that to account for his book is to account for his life.

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better."

He felt himself in suspension between the two worlds, the warm, neat civilization behind his back, the cool, dark mystery outside. We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind.

It's like when you read a book and you know that the words are important, but the images blossoming in your imagination are even more important because it's your mind that allows the words to come to life.

The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.

Writing is a combination of being alert to your outer surroundings and alive to your inner reality.

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

The books I'm writing are houses that I build for myself.

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

But when reflexion begins to play upon these objects... like some trick of magic each object is loosed into a group of impressions - colour, odour, texture... And if we continue to dwell in thought on this world... the whole scope of observation is dwarfed into the narrow chamber of the individual mind.

What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?