Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

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

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

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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