I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the artist's struggle with imperfection and the relief found in destruction of flawed work.
In this quote, Thomas Bernhard articulates the inner turmoil experienced by an artist when faced with their own imperfect creations. He suggests that the agony of confronting flawed work can lead to despair, and ironically, he finds a sense of satisfaction in the act of destruction. This reveals a deeper commentary on the artist's relationship with their work, where instead of embracing failure, the act of obliteration becomes a source of pleasure.
In practice
In a discussion about the creative process, you might refer to this quote to illustrate the torment artists face.
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
Only when I am by seawater can I truly breathe, to say nothing of my ability to think.
Everyone is a virtuoso on his own instrument, but together they add up to an intolerable cacophony.
We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.
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.
Women were like rivers, their banks were unreachable, the night often rang with the cries of the drowned.
I am not an actress. I can only play me - on and off the screen.
The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I'm not kidding
Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me "weak" or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life...If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.
The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where the human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal through the senses with abstractions.
Choreography is writing on your feet.
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind.
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