Quotes from Elfriede Jelinek


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A woman who becomes famous through her work reduces her erotic value. A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression.


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


I'm not one of those women writers who are obsessed by their ego, possibly because I don't have one.


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


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


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


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


The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.


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.


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


As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace. Football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or a catalyst for good as well as bad.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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


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.


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


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