Top 35 Elfriede Jelinek Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Trust is fine, but control is better.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

2. “Vorsorge ist besser als das Nachsehen zu haben.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

4. “Vice is basically the love of failure.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

5. “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

6. “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

7. “Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

9. “Women age early, and their mistake is not knowing where to hide all the time that lies behind them so that no one sees it. What are they to do, devour it like the umbilical cords of their children? Hell and damnation!”

— Elfriede Jelinek

10. “Love points the way. Desire is its ignorant advisor.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

11. “Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

12. “He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

14. “I cannot stand public attention, I just can’t. Of course, if I may I might write something instead.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

16. “Sicherheit erzeugt Angst vor dem Unsicheren.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

17. “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.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

18. “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.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

19. “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.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

20. “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.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

21. “Many young people are still driven to art, as in olden times. Most of them are driven by their parents, who know nothing about art – only that it exists.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

22. “Everyone wants to look for something of their own, a house of their own, a child of their own, a partner of their own, entirely for themselves alone. No one is satisfied with a room of their own any more.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

23. “Mentally damaged people need more room than the normal sort, they can’t be put off with excuses, and they need at least as much space to run around in as a medium-sized sheep dog.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

24. “By not encouraging injuries, a mother avoids having to close wounds later on. Erika’s mother prefers inflicting injuries herself, then supervising the therapy.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

25. “For Erika, the most profound evidence of love is failure.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

26. “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

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

33. “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.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

34. “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.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

35. “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

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

— Elfriede Jelinek

37. “Manchmal scheitern wir in der Tat, und ich glaube fast, dieses prinzipielle Scheitern ist unser letztes Ziel.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

38. “Erika glides down into the warmth, the body-warm brook of shame, a bath in which one submerges cautiously because the water is rather dirty.”

— Elfriede Jelinek

39. “She only wants to be an instrument on which she will teach him to play.”

— Elfriede Jelinek