Giving presents is a terrible habit, motivated by a guilty conscience and very often a fear of loneliness, a wicked malpractice, and the present, the gift received, is not appreciated because it should have been more, and more still, and it ultimately only creates hatred.

One day I realized I’d never make it as a painter and decided I had to get rid of those things that were a perpetual reminder of my worthlessness. But then, the way everyone does, I refused to believe it, and protracted the agony for years.

Man is so constituted that he reserves his strongest curses for the very things that keep him alive. People gulp down the tablets that save their lives, yet are marching in the streets nonstop in their brainless urge to condemn and demonstrate against these life-saving tablets.

I found myself sitting opposite the so-called Virginia Woolf of Vienna, this creator of tasteless poetry and prose who has never done anything throughout her life, it seems to me, but wallow in her petit bourgeois kitsch.

Existence is misconception, says Oehler. This is something we have to come to terms with early enough, so that we have a basis upon which we can exist, says Oehler.

All my life I have dreaded nothing so much as falling into the hands of psychiatrists, beside whom all other doctors, disastrous though they may be, are far less dangerous, for in our present-day society psychiatrists are a law unto themselves and enjoy total immunity.

A thinking person feels sick getting up in the morning

He hates her, and yet he invites her to dinner at least once a month in the Via Veneto, which he loves but she loathes, and although she declines all his invitations he goes on issuing them.

Funerals never succeed if they're pompous they're repugnant if they're as simple as can be they're repugnant making a theatre out of death always goes wrong

Each of us has protracted periods in which we do not exist at all, only pretend to exist. Sometimes the actual existence and the pretended existence of a person merge in a way that is fatal for that person.

It's incredible what we do just to survive Incompetence surrounds us Incompetence and hatred

The strange thing is that I think of nothing but my wife more or less the whole time, yet when I stand by her grave I feel nothing relating to her. Only when I walk away from her grave do I once more experience the horror of her having left me.

I suffer from paranoia sometimes I hear the earth shake and I see cracks in the walls At night I walk through shattered towns and I am fighting with everyone

My childhood and youth were brutally alone, just as my old age is brutally alone. As if nature had a right to keep pushing me away, back into myself, away from everything else, towards everything else, but always up against the limit.

I have overstepped the boundary of madness and even of insanity very often in my life, but that afternoon I believed that I had reached the point of no return.

I really needed this climbing up here on this hill to discuss The Tempest with you and all I get is your 'naturally' all I ever get from anybody is this 'naturally' everyone around me keeps saying 'naturally' when what they should be saying all the time is 'artificially'

My house is really just a giant prison. I quite like that; walls that are as blank as possible. They’re blank and bleak. It has quite a salutary effect on my work. The books, or whatever it is I write, are like the house I live in.

A student should always choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of his concentration for his studies, while the hostile place will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despair.

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one day you fall down and you're dead