of the decoration work going on in his flat.)



But the decorators are only there during the day.



Of course. Writers work at night. It would never occur to a craftsman to pick up the tools of his trade in the middle of the night.



(A man enters the coffeehouse and greets Thomas Bernhard. They evoke their participation in a solidarity gala organized by Viennese artists in 1964 in support of "Tschauner's Stegreiftheater". Thomas Bernhard recalls playing the part of a gendarme.)



You deliberately keep your distance from other living writers.



No, not deliberately at all. It comes naturally. Where there's no interest, there can be no inclination.



Sometimes you hurl abuse at them too, like Canetti or Handke for example.



I don't hurl abuse at anyone at all. That's nonsense. Almost all writers arenow, and again and again, endlessly, it's unbearable. Even though he was a petty-bourgeois writer, ghastly, uninspired, who only wrote for a petty-bourgeois readership. That could only interest the petty-bourgeois, the kind of milieu he describes, it's uninspired and stupid, some fiddle-playing professor who travels somewhere, or a family in Lübeck, how lovely, but it's nothing more than someone like Wilhelm Raabe. What rubbish Thomas Mann churned out about political matters, really. He was totally uptight and a typical German petty-bourgeois. With a greedy wife.



For me, that's the typical German writer combination. Always a woman in the background, be it Mann or Zuckmayer, always making sure these characters get to sit next to the head of state, at every idiotic opening of a sculpture exhibition or a bridge.