Elfriede Jelinek Quotations

Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds

I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award.

As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing.

I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.

I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing

It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people.

I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead

I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

Only he who loves and is loved for his own sake can be happy, and what produces that happiness is not so much the sense of sexual communion as of two people being together ... the sexual act viewed as a whole probably affords less happiness than a totally ordinary kiss or often indeed one simple word from the one you love.

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

It is not enough ... simply to surrender oneself brainlessly to love, when it knocks at the door, one must also calculate because of later life, which does sometimes follow.

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.

Anna despises two classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop.

Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.

After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.

Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.

Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!

The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.

you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.

Vice is basically the love of failure.

He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.

Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.

The Academy may not want to give the prize to another young author

was made into an award-winning film, ''for her musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power.

The system that judges the worth of women, the system that judges a woman's worth through her youthful body and looks and not for what she does.

When I write, I have always tried to be on the side of the weak. The side of the powerful is not literature's side.

After this I cannot even formally remain in the Swedish Academy,

It (the selection of Jelinek) has done irreparable damage to the Nobel literature prize, both those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who came after her.

That started very early on, and then I guess I tried to close up this fissure with something that was accessible to me, and all I had was writing.