“Listen carefully because what I'm going to tell you now is very important, so pay attention, you see, one always walks for a reason, when you walk it's because you're going somewhere, to work, to the grocery store to do your shopping, to your girlfriend's house for a quickie, to walk your dog, and even if you're going nowhere, if you don't have a real destination, there's always a reason for walking, to stretch your legs, to exercise, to ponder your future, whereas one dances for nothing, only for the beauty of dancing, for the form, because one can never tell the dancer from the dance, as Yeats put it so well, the walker always walks for a reason, it's the reason that makes him walk, good or bad, useful or useless, doesn't matter, ah but one dances for no reason, that's what you have to understand if you're going to stay and listen to me, I'm not walking here, I'm dancing, get it, I'm doing acrobatics, I don't tell my stories in order to get somewhere, I tell them for the simple pleasure of telling, no more no less, and if you're listening in order to find out what's going to happen at the end, you're wasting your time, you have to listen just for the pleasure of listening to my voice, to the dancing of my voice if you prefer...”

“I hope you're ready, because I'm about to tell you the story of my life. More specifically, why my life ended. And if you're listening to these tapes, you're one of the reasons why.”

“Tell me I'm a screwed up mess, that I never listen, listen. Tell me you don't want my kiss, that you need your distance, distance. Tell me anything but don't you say he's what you're missing baby. If he's the reason that you're leaving me tonight, spare me what you think and Tell Me a Lie.”

“If you're going to walk on thin ice, you might as well dance.”

“What can you do. You get a name, you're called 'Thomas Bernhard', and it stays that way for the rest of your life. And if at some point you go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.”

“And I told him, I said: "One day you're going to miss the subway because it's not going to come. One of these days, it's going to break down and it's not going to come around and everyone else will just wait for the next one or will take the bus, or walk, or run to the next station: they will go on with their lives. And you're not going to be able to go on with your life! You'll be standing there, in the subway station, staring at the tube. Why? Because you think that everything has to happen perfectly and on time and when you think it's going to happen! Well guess what! That's not how things happen! And you'll be the only one who's not going to be able to go on with life, just because your subway broke down. So you know what, you've got to let go, you've got to know that things don't happen the way you think they're going to happen, but that's okay, because there's always the bus, there's always the next station...you can always take a cab.”