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.

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.

The moment workers can afford too little they rebel. The last time this was a real danger was 1950. Communists took advantage of supply problems and stirred up gullible people against their very own country.

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

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

She will prolong her life by the length of her story, even though time will wear on inexorably as she tells it, thus depriving her of the chance to have a new experience.

Ah, lust! How one would like to make it the cornerstone of self! But I wouldn't go ahead and build on it if I were you.

simple people. . . . listen to music with their hearts and enjoy it more than those who are spoiled, jaded, blase.

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!

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.

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

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)"

Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Vice is basically the love of failure.

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

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

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