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"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
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"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
Explore more quotes by Elfriede Jelinek
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
"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."
"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."
"I cannot stand public attention, I just can't. Of course, if I may I might write something instead."
"I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity."
"Eroding solidarity paradoxically makes a society more susceptible to the construction of substitute collectives and fascisms of all kinds."
"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."
"I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people."
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