Elfriede Jelinek Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

I don't know if it's enough for a whole life, a man wants to enjoy many women, a man is different.

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

Elfriede Jelinek
I have a feeling that you despise your body and that you only value art, you only value your argent needs, but eating and sleeping aren't enough. You believe that your appearance is your enemy, and the only friend you have is music. Why look just in the mirror, look at your reflection, you'll never find a better friend that yourself.

Elfriede Jelinek
In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work.

Elfriede Jelinek
Intellectuals will still go on emphasizing free will even when they've got nothing left to eat.

Elfriede Jelinek
The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions.

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

Elfriede Jelinek
Weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest.

Elfriede Jelinek
The most powerful urge known to Man is the urge to be free of manual labour. Any means that accomplishes that end is fine. Some people erroneously imagine that they have a birthright to non-manual work.

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
There are photographs under the pistol, showing his mother genitals. These genitals make no perceptible impression on him, though it was through them that he first entered the world.

Elfriede Jelinek
Money is unimportant, but it is reassuring to have it.

Elfriede Jelinek
Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

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
Time stands still for man and woman alike, it is a good moment, because Time usually makes everything worse, poor people grow old, rich people can buy a little time but they can'hold it up for good, it always catches up with them. In the last analysis, Time is democratic.

Elfriede Jelinek
Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted.

Elfriede Jelinek
There are no holidays for art; and that's just fine with the artist.

Elfriede Jelinek
There is no such thing as the universal 'Man' never has been, never will be, there is the worker and there is the one who exploits the worker and those who abet him.

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

Elfriede Jelinek
When discussing Bach's six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach.

Elfriede Jelinek
Every day, a piece of music, a short story, or a poem dies because its existence is no longer justified in our time. And things that were once considered immortal have become mortal again, no one knows them anymore. Even though they deserve to survive.

Elfriede Jelinek