Top 60 Quotes & Sayings by Elfriede Jelinek
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist Elfriede Jelinek.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I don't do what I do willingly, but I have to do it.
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. On the other hand, the more I read, the more I felt this well-known fissure between me and the world.
I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people.
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.
How can the writer know reality if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines.
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.
I describe the relationship between man and woman as a Hegelian relationship between master and slave. As long as men are able to increase their sexual value through work, fame or wealth, while women are only powerful through their body, beauty and youth, nothing will change.
I do not want to have the feeling of writing 'for eternity', so to speak.
I am a sort of justice fanatic, and I always have to give a voice to those who get a raw deal.
The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.
I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead.
It's interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy.
My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.
I can really write what I want. I can take time; I can do nothing for a year. That is paradise.
The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.
Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.
My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.
The problem is that it is difficult to translate.
A woman who becomes famous through her work reduces her erotic value. A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression.
As long as I have books and DVDs, I don't miss much.
It's a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet.
I'm not one of those women writers who are obsessed by their ego, possibly because I don't have one.
I am not made to be pulled into the public as a person. I feel threatened there.
I find the Internet to be the most wonderful thing there is. It connects people. Everyone can have input.
I associate the metaphor of sport with war. The unrest in the former Yugoslavia, after all, started with a football match that then became charged in nationalist ways and ended in violence.
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 do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.
I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.
In Austria, a rather authoritarian Catholic country, the role of the social admonisher traditionally fell to artists because there were no great political thinkers.
I seek to cast an incorruptible gaze on women, especially where they are the accomplices of men.
My inspiration came especially in the 1950s through the Vienna Group founded by writer H.C. Artmann. It showed me that if you want to say something, you have to let the language itself say it, because language is usually more meaningful than the mere content that one wishes to convey.
Internet is exemplary for me. I do not want to have the feeling of writing 'for eternity,' so to speak. The fleetingness of the Internet has therefore become very attractive to me.
As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace. Football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or a catalyst for good as well as bad.
It doesn't suit me as a person to be put on public display.
Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.
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.
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.
My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language
Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.
I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.
The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.
He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.
I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead
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
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.
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.
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.
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.
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.
Vice is basically the love of failure.
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.
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!
Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.
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.
Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.
Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.
Trust is fine, but control is better.
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