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
writing feelings want
I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak.
government
The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.
cannot gladly manage
I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people.
against expose led meaning music musical process sound true words
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.
The problem is that it is difficult to translate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.