Elfriede Jelinek
50 quotes
Biography
Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature 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".
"For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better."
"Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place."
"Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back."
"The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude."
"Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted."
"There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist."
"Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner."
"Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in."
"I have a feeling that you despise your body and that you only value art, you only value your argent needs, but eating and sleeping aren’t enough. You believe that your appearance is your enemy, and the only friend you have is music. Why look just in the mirror, look at your reflection, you’ll never find a better friend that yourself."
"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. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs!"
"First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk."
"Der Sensible muß verbrennen, dieser zarte Nachtfalter."
"Pain itself is merely a consequence of the desire for pleasure, the desire t destroy, to annihilate; in its supreme form, pain is a variety of pleasure."
"The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable."
"Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate."
"Beethoven’s sonatas, whether show so much variety that one has to ask oneself the fundamental question of what the much vilified word ‘sonata means. Perhaps Beethoven applied the word to entities that are not even sonatas in the strict sense of the term. One has to perceive new law in the highly dramatic musical form. Often in the sonata, feeling eludes form. In Beethoven, that is not the case, for here the two go hand in hand; feeling makes form aware of a hole in the ground and vice versa."
"When discussing Bach’s six Brandenburg concertos, the artistically aware person usually states, among other things, that when these masterpieces were composed, the stars were dancing in heavens. God and his dwelling place are always involved whenever these people talk about Bach."
"Art is not a Trojan horse."
"Don’t start anything you can’t finish."
"For the eyes are the mirror of the soul and ought to remain unscathed if at all possible. Otherwise people will suppose the soul is done for."
"In this new era, what sets you free is knowledge, not work."
"In the case of a writer like Musil writing is often a graceful act,like a silvery fish leaping."
"The world would be a lot better off if it paid more attention to its philosophers and artists than to its own tiny egotistic spirit, which lacks an overview. People should place their belief in Beethoven and Socrates."
"The rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all."
"Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature."