Quotes by Elfriede Jelinek

About Elfriede Jelinek:

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall, windows to the outer world: The mob wants to be seen.

Elfriede Jelinek

She will prolong her life by the length of her story, even though time will wear on inexorably as she tells it, thus depriving her of the chance to have a new experience.

Elfriede Jelinek

Money never goes out of fashion.

Elfriede Jelinek

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into...

Elfriede Jelinek

Only the TV sounds are real, they are the actual events. All the people around here experience the same things at the same time, except for some loner, who switches to the educational channel.

Elfriede Jelinek

The moment workers can afford too little they rebel. The last time this was a real danger was 1950. Communists took advantage of supply problems and stirred up gullible people against their very own country.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

Elfriede Jelinek

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

Author Bio

  • NameElfriede Jelinek
  • DescriptionAustrian writer
  • BornOctober 20, 1946
  • CountryAustria
  • ProfessionWriter; Playwright; Screenwriter; Poet; Translator; Novelist
  • WorksThe Piano Teacher; Women As Lovers; The Children Of The Dead
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Georg Büchner Prize; Walter-Hasenclever-Preis Der Stadt Aachen; ; Franz Kafka Prize; Heinrich-Böll-Preis; Stig Dagerman Prize