Elfriede Jelinek Quotes (21 Quotes)

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.

The Academy may not want to give the prize to another young author.

That started very early on, and then I guess I tried to close up this fissure with something that was accessible to me, and all I had was writing.

The system that judges the worth of women, the system that judges a woman's worth through her youthful body and looks and not for what she does.

depicting it as a realm of death in her phantasmagorical novel, 'Die Kinder der Toten.'

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

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.

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

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

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

was made into an award-winning film, ''for her musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power.

It (the selection of Jelinek) has done irreparable damage to the Nobel literature prize, both those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who came after her.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.