103 Quotes by Elfriede Jelinek

I only enjoy what I can see, because I don’t feel anything. For example, your new wallpaper. I like it and it can stay, it’s quiet and it keeps quiet at least. Luckily I don’t have to feel it, just see it.

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.

After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority.

I do not want to have the feeling of writing “for eternity,” so to speak.

The Man’s rage is huge. Moil and toil and turmoil, he’s coming to the boil, time to cool the heat with a jet of foam. He wants the woman to take off her clothes right away. So that she measures up to his size. He wants to conduct his lightning into her. Not that his wildfire could ever be tamed by her, and anyway he has plenty of matches. To create himself anew, as often as need be.

De Sade says you must commit crimes. In using the word crime we’re adopting the consensus term, though among ourselves we would not describe any of our actions as such. We need the universally valid norm to get a kick out of our own extremeness. 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.

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

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.