Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

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Elfriede Jelinek

Profession : Playwright

Birth : October 20, 1946

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

Elfriede Jelinek

As long as I have books and DVDs, I don't miss much.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.

Elfriede Jelinek

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

I associate the metaphor of sport with war. The unrest in the former Yugoslavia, after all, started with a football match that then became charged in nationalist ways and ended in violence.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

I am a sort of justice fanatic, and I always have to give a voice to those who get a raw deal.

Elfriede Jelinek

The smaller a group, the easier it is for more people to argue and enter into discussions. The U.S. is vast. It's too large. The intellectuals hide out in enclaves, in big cities or universities, like a bunch of chickens hiding from a fox.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

Internet is exemplary for me. I do not want to have the feeling of writing 'for eternity,' so to speak. The fleetingness of the Internet has therefore become very attractive to me.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek