Elfriede Jelinek quotes

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate. (Elfriede Jelinek)
For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
sewing in itself is already in the women's blood. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Work is not a constraint. Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however, can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
if someone has a fate, then it's a man, if someone gets a fate, then it's a woman. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Vice is basically the love of failure. View quote
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. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions. (Elfriede Jelinek)
nothing comes of nothing after all. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Stifter tells us that people are not free, that they are slaves to the laws of Nature. So you have to commit violent deeds (if you don't have anyone to do other kinds of deeds with), actions that ordinary people would call crimes but which we define as the norm, though of course it is our norm and no that of the rest. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Art is not a Trojan horse. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Murder and assault are not lunacy; they are the logical conclusions if you live a life without an assured financial foundation. (Elfriede Jelinek)
The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
We are monsters, even if we disguise ourselves as ordinary people. We are the children of ordinary people but we are not content with that. Inwardly we are consumed with wickedness, outwardly we are grammar school pupils. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek
Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end. View quote
Elfriede Jelinek