Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinek
Elfriede Jelinekis an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth20 October 1946
CountryUnited States of America
children mistake women
Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!
children hands parent
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.
powerful side tried
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.
writing attention may
I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead
fashion block character
Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show: what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism is repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the “luxuriousness” of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this manoeuvre, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye.
lying book
He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.
vices
Vice is basically the love of failure.
people example cinema
you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.
firsts fine
The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.
writing feelings want
I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.
work animal savages
Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.
ease irony draws
It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.
deserving-it expression awards
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.
solitude walks ifs
After all, when you take a walk you're after solitude, and if the solitude won't come to you, you must go to it.