Literary Birthday – 20 October – Elfriede Jelinek

Happy Birthday, Elfriede Jelinek, born 20 October 1946.

10 Quotes

1. Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that’s just fine with the artist.
2. He lies like a book. And he reads a lot of books.
3. As is said about most writers 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.
4. Very few women wait for Mr Right. Most women take the first and worst Mr Wrong.
5. I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.
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.
7. Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.
8. 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.
9. Vice is basically the love of failure.
10. Happiness happens by chance, and is not a law or the logical consequences of actions.

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. Her works include The Piano Teacher and Wonderful, Wonderful Times.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elfriede_jelinek_2004_small.jpg

The original uploader was Ghuengsberg at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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