Quotes from Elfriede Jelinek

paula's puny stomach, which will soon be fat and swollen, so that for the same money one could suddenly have many more pounds of paula, is up for auction. but nobody wants it. with a pig that would be an enormous gain in value. with paula it's a sign, mat she was easy to get, too easy, and now it's all the harder to dispose of her.

Indem die Frau nicht mehr gefällt, tut sie den ersten Schritt zu ihrer Freiwerdung. Ein Tritt gegen die Basis einer Pyramide aus stiller Gewalt...

She wants to ascend to the exotic, to what infatuates the sentences yet tears open the mind.

Erika non prova niente e non ha mai provato niente, è insensibile come un cartone catramato sotto la pioggia

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.

In Austria, a rather authoritarian Catholic country, the role of the social admonisher traditionally fell to artists because there were no great political thinkers.

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

It's a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet.

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

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 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 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.

Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

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

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.

Trust is fine, but control is better.

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.

How can the writer know reality if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines.

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

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

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

Vice is basically the love of failure.