Elfriede Jelinek citations

“The rules of art do not exist, because what makes art art is the fact that it obeys no rules at all.”

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

“Vice is basically the love of failure.”

“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.”

“Nothing is natural, yet everything is as it is by nature.”

“I don’t know if it’s enough for a whole life, a man wants to enjoy many women, a man is different.”

“sewing in itself is already in the women's blood.”

“The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable.”

“Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits between the gifted and the ungifted.”

“In the old days people had no time to harm the environment because they were busy doing harm to themselves, in the War, for instance.”

“Time stands still for man and woman alike, it is a good moment, because Time usually makes everything worse, poor people grow old, rich people can buy a little time but they can'hold it up for good, it always catches up with them. In the last analysis, Time is democratic.”

“The most powerful urge known to Man is the urge to be free of manual labour. Any means that accomplishes that end is fine. Some people erroneously imagine that they have a birthright to non-manual work.”

“weak are defeated by the strong in the world of Nature. A reed by the north wind, for instance. And silence by the forest.”

“Death the Laveller annihilates all distinctions.”

“often these women marry or they are ruined some other way.”

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

“A sensitive person gets burned, like a delicate moth.”

“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.”

“There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.”

“The poet is a king in his realm. His is empire of imagination, in which there are unlimited mansions.”

“nothing comes of nothing after all.”

“First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to listen to pop, rock, and punk.”

“Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner.”

“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.”

“One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it.”

“Stifter tells us that people are not free, that they are slaves to the laws of Nature. So you have to commit violent deeds (if you don’t have anyone to do other kinds of deeds with), actions that ordinary people would call crimes but which we define as the norm, though of course it is our norm and no that of the rest.”

“Every man would like to possess all the women in the world, but a woman only wants the man she loves and to whom she is faithful.”

“Work is not a constraint. Man's activity provides his true fulfilment. True fulfilment however, can only be achieved if one man is not another man's slave.”

“Art is not a Trojan horse.”