Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

• Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Sunday, Leisure, Language

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.67, Profile Books

  48 Copy quote

• 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

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.64, Profile Books

  26 Copy quote

• Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Ignorant, Desire, Way

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.277, Profile Books

  12 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.69, Profile Books

  7 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Mr Right, Waiting, Firsts

  Elfriede Jelinek, Joachim Neugroschel (2009). “The Piano Teacher”, p.262, Grove Press

  9 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Fighting, Men, Sexist

  56 Copy quote

• Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Art, Order, Refuse

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.83, Profile Books

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  "Wonderful, Wonderful Times". Book by Elfriede Jelinek, 1990.

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.25, Profile Books

  18 Copy quote

• Trust is fine, but control is better.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Fine

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.10, Profile Books

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Elfriede Jelinek, Martin Chalmers (1994). “Women as Lovers”, p.32, Profile Books

  16 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Kind, Construction, Substitutes

  Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Solitude, Walks, Ifs

  Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1990). “Wonderful, Wonderful Times”, p.224, Profile Books

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Firsts, Fine

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.10, Profile Books

  7 Copy quote

• 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, Mistake, Women

  Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1992). “Lust”, Profile Books

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Play, Long, Language

  13 Copy quote

• Vice is basically the love of failure.

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Vices

  Elfriede Jelinek (2010). “The Piano Teacher”, p.118, Profile Books

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Ease, Irony, Draws

  Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Fashion, Block, Character

  4 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Thinking, Political, Growing

  Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November 2004.

  6 Copy quote

• 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, Deserving It, Expression

  Interview with Marika Griehsel, www.nobelprize.org. November, 2004.

  57 Copy quote

• 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

  Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1990). “Wonderful, Wonderful Times”, p.18, Profile Books

  11 Copy quote

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

  Elfriede Jelinek

  Work, Animal, Savages

  Elfriede Jelinek, Michael Hulse (1992). “Lust”, Profile Books

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Elfriede Jelinek, Martin Chalmers (1994). “Women as Lovers”, p.57, Profile Books

  4 Copy quote

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