Elfriede Jelinek famous quotes

04-17-2025

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Sunday #Leisure #Language
Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Mr Right #Waiting #Firsts
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 Jelinek

#Doors #Doe #Sometimes
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 Jelinek

#Stories #Pieces #Justified
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 â€œluxuriousnessâ€ 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

#Fashion #Block #Character
Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.
-- Elfriede Jelinek
Trust is fine, but control is better.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Fine
Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Ignorant #Desire #Way
Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Art #Order #Refuse
My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Play #Long #Language
It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Ease #Irony #Draws
I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Thinking #Political #Growing
I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Fighting #Men #Sexist
He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Lying #Book
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

#Awards #Expression #Faces
Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Art #Holiday #Fine
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

#Writing #Worry #Feelings
Vice is basically the love of failure.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Vices
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 Jelinek

#People #Example #Cinema
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 Jelinek

#Kissing #Simple #Two
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 Jelinek

#Home #Class #Two
The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Firsts #Fine
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 Jelinek

#Children #Hands #Parent
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 Jelinek

#Children #Women #Lying
I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Writing #Feelings #Want
Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Kind #Construction #Substitutes
I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Writing #Attention #May
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.
-- Elfriede Jelinek

#Work #Animal #Savages

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 ClÃ©zio
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