Elfriede Jelinek quotes

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist known for her provocative and innovative works. Her writing often explores themes of gender, power, and social criticism. She has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for her distinctive voice and fearless commentary. Here are 61 of her quotes:

For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.

Elfriede Jelinek

sewing in itself is already in the women's blood.

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

if someone has a fate, then it's a man, if someone gets a fate, then it's a woman.

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

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

Elfriede Jelinek

Vice is basically the love of failure.

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

He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.

Elfriede Jelinek

nothing comes of nothing after all.

Elfriede Jelinek

First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk.

Elfriede Jelinek

Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner.

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it.

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.

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

Art is not a Trojan horse.

Elfriede Jelinek

Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back.

Elfriede Jelinek

The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude.

Elfriede Jelinek

Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in.

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.

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.

Elfriede Jelinek