Quotes By 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.

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

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.