Jimmy

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Thomas Bernhard
“FLEISCHMANN: Since the days of Sigmund Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis the interpretation of dreams has played a big role in Austria[n life]. What is your attitude to all that?

BERNHARD: I’ve never spent enough time reading Freud to say anything intelligent about him. Freud has had no effect whatsoever on dreams, or on the interpretation of dreams. Of course psychoanalysis is nothing new. Freud didn’t discover it; it had of course always been around before. It just wasn’t practiced on such a fashionably huge scale, and in such million-fold, money-grubbing forms, as it has been now for decades, and as it won’t be for much longer. Because even in America, as I know, it’s fallen so far out of fashion that they just lay people out on the celebrated couch and scoop their psychological guts out with a spoon.

FLEISCHMANN: I take it then that psychoanalysis is not a means gaining knowledge for you?

BERNHARD: Well, no; for me it’s never been that kind of thing. I think of Freud simply as a good writer, and whenever I’ve read something of his, I’ve always gotten the feeling of having read the work of an extraordinary, magnificent writer. I’m no competent judge of his medical qualifications, and as for what’s known as psychoanalysis, I’ve personally always tended to think of it as nonsense or as a middle-aged man’s hobby-horse that turned into an old man’s hobby-horse. But Freud’s fame is well-deserved, because of course he was a genuinely great, extraordinary personality. There’s no denying that. One of the few great personalities who had a beard and was great despite his beardiness.

FLEISCHMANN: Do you have something against beards?

BERNHARD: No. But the majority of people call people who have a long beard or the longest possible beard great personalities and suppose that the longer one’s beard is, the greater the personality one is. Freud’s beard was relatively long, but too pointy; that was typical of him. Perhaps it was the typical Freudian trait, the pointy beard. It’s possible.”
Thomas Bernhard

John Ashbery
“Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself whereas certitude implies further ambiguity.”
John Ashbery

Djuna Barnes
“A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth!”
Djuna Barnes

Flannery O'Connor
“So many people can now write competent stories that the short story is in danger of dying of competence.”
Flannery O'Connor

George Orwell
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.”
George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950

80277 The Kindred Spirits — 300 members — last activity Sep 23, 2025 07:28AM
Place to meet and talk about anything.
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35402 Loosed in Translation — 532 members — last activity Mar 06, 2026 05:09PM
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40475 The Extra Cool Group! (of people Michael is experimenting on) — 162 members — last activity Jan 27, 2026 07:27PM
*Note: This group, although it lives on in a sense, like a photograph, capturing a moment so people can look back later and go, "Oh, wow, you looked s ...more
15336 fiction files redux — 295 members — last activity Oct 10, 2022 09:43AM
this is a literary love-in, baby . . . books, literature, fiction of all shapes and sizes, these things we discuss . . . make yourself at home, check ...more
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