Quotes from Elfriede Jelinek

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

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

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

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

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'm not one of those women writers who are obsessed by their ego, possibly because I don't have one.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

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.

most expensive originals have cheap imitations.

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.

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

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

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.

the ignorant majority, which does however possess one thing in abundance: It is raring for a fight.