Elfriede Jelinek quotes
-
“Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.67, Profile Books
-
“Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek, Joachim Neugroschel (2009). “The Piano Teacher”, p.262, Grove Press
-
“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.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek, Martin Chalmers (1994). “Women as Lovers”, p.32, Profile Books
-
“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.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.64, Profile 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.”
-- Elfriede Jelinek -
“Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.69, Profile Books
-
“Trust is fine, but control is better.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.10, Profile Books
-
“Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.277, Profile Books
-
-
“Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.83, Profile Books
-
“My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language”
-- Elfriede Jelinek -
“It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.
-
“I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.
-
-
“I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.”
-- Elfriede Jelinek -
“He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.”
-- Elfriede Jelinek -
“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 JelinekSource : Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November, 2004.
-
“Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.”
-- 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 -
“Vice is basically the love of failure.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.118, Profile Books
-
“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.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek, Martin Chalmers (1994). “Women as Lovers”, p.57, Profile Books
-
“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.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : "Wonderful, Wonderful Times". Book by Elfriede Jelinek, 1990.
-
-
“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.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1990). “Wonderful, Wonderful Times”, p.18, Profile Books
-
“The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.10, Profile Books
-
“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.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.
-
“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!”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1992). “Lust”, Profile Books
-
-
“I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.”
-- Elfriede Jelinek -
“Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.
-
“I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead”
-- Elfriede Jelinek -
“Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.”
-- Elfriede JelinekSource : Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1992). “Lust”, Profile Books
-
You may also like:
-
Arthur Schnitzler
Author -
Christa Wolf
Literary critic -
Doris Lessing
Novelist -
Franz Kafka
Writer -
Gunter Grass
Novelist -
Harold Pinter
Playwright -
Herta Muller
Novelist -
Ingeborg Bachmann
Poet -
Isabelle Huppert
Film actress -
J.M.G. Le Clézio
Writer -
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosopher -
Michael Haneke
Film director -
Orhan Pamuk
Novelist -
Peter Handke
Novelist -
Robert Musil
Writer -
Samuel Beckett
Novelist -
Susan Sontag
Writer -
Thomas Bernhard
Novelist -
Thomas Mann
Novelist -
W. G. Sebald
Writer