Quotes by Elfriede Jelinek

• I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people.
• The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.
• My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.
• My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language.
• 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.
• It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.
• I have the feeling it will influence my future writing to the extent that without any material worries I could develop a greater ease, even lightheartedness, in my writing.
• I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.
• I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.
• I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead.
• Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.
• 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.
• The problem is that it is difficult to translate.
• I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.