Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

In Austria, a rather authoritarian Catholic country, the role of the social admonisher traditionally fell to artists because there were no great political thinkers.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I'm not one of those women writers who are obsessed by their ego, possibly because I don't have one.

- Elfriede Jelinek

How can the writer know reality if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I don't do what I do willingly, but I have to do it.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I seek to cast an incorruptible gaze on women, especially where they are the accomplices of men.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

As long as I have books and DVDs, I don't miss much.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

It's interesting that the treatment of historical events by art precedes the civilisation of people through democracy.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I am a sort of justice fanatic, and I always have to give a voice to those who get a raw deal.

- Elfriede Jelinek

It's a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I am not made to be pulled into the public as a person. I feel threatened there.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I find the Internet to be the most wonderful thing there is. It connects people. Everyone can have input.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

- Elfriede Jelinek

I can really write what I want. I can take time; I can do nothing for a year. That is paradise.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

It doesn't suit me as a person to be put on public display.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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.

- Elfriede Jelinek

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

- Elfriede Jelinek

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

- Elfriede Jelinek