Bernhard stayed only in one place and studied it deeper and deeper. At the end of the day, he himself was a provincial petit bourgeois who had a very keen sense of the hidden horrors of the petty provincial bourgeois life. He was never able to overcome that, he was stuck in this world that he hated but was also the only one he could imagine. He needed this kind of hatred as the gas that fuelled his narrative engine. He exaggerated reality, constructed it, and transformed it into a caricature of the existing world.

Ilija Trojanow: Interview mit Arianna Dagnino, in dies.: Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press 2015, S. 31.