Anna despises two classes of people: first, those who own their own homes and have cars and families, and second, everybody else. Constantly she is on the verge of exploding. With rage. A pool of pure red. The pool is filled with speechlessness that talks away at her nonstop.

Elfriede Jelinek

Categorized in : Two Class Home

Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

Elfriede Jelinek

leisure sunday language

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

justified pieces stories

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

Elfriede Jelinek

fine holiday art

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

Elfriede Jelinek

refuse order art

Only he who loves and is loved for his own sake can be happy, and what produces that happiness is not so much the sense of sexual communion as of two people being together ... the sexual act viewed as a whole probably affords less happiness than a totally ordinary kiss or often indeed one simple word from the one you love.

Elfriede Jelinek

kissing simple two

It is not enough ... simply to surrender oneself brainlessly to love, when it knocks at the door, one must also calculate because of later life, which does sometimes follow.

Elfriede Jelinek

doe doors sometimes

I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.

Elfriede Jelinek

sexist fighting men

Very few women wait for Mr. Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr. Wrong.

Elfriede Jelinek

mr-right waiting firsts

Trust is fine, but control is better.

Elfriede Jelinek

fine

My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language

Elfriede Jelinek

language play long

The first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better.

Elfriede Jelinek

fine firsts

Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.

Elfriede Jelinek

ignorant desire way

Seek and you shall find the repulsive things you secretly hope to find.

Elfriede Jelinek

Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds.

Elfriede Jelinek

construction substitutes kind

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

block fashion character

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

parent children hands

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

cinema example people

Work restores humankind and all its attributes to the savage animal condition that was its original intended state.

Elfriede Jelinek

savages work animal

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.

Elfriede Jelinek

deserving-it awards expression

It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease.

Elfriede Jelinek

irony draws ease