Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.

was made into an award-winning film, ”for her musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s cliches and their subjugating power.

That started very early on, and then I guess I tried to close up this fissure with something that was accessible to me, and all I had was writing.

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...

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...

The government has once again made the right socially acceptable.

She will prolong her life by the length of her story, even though time will wear on inexorably as she tells it, thus depriving her of the chance to have a new experience.

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

No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.

The problem is that it is difficult to translate.

I, however, have really never been anywhere yet, not because some sins or other could wrap themselves around me there, but because I’d rather sin at home, where God even announces the weather to me...

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

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

The system that judges the worth of women, the system that judges a woman’s worth through her youthful body and looks and not for what she does.

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...

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

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

The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a...

I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people.

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

Her body is one big refrigerator, where Art is well stored.

Stealing isn’t so easy, often it’s hard work, otherwise we’d all be doing it.

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

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.

The mob not only grabs hold of art without being entitled to do so, but it also enters the artist. It takes up residence inside the artist and smashes a few holes in the wall,...

It (the selection of Jelinek) has done irreparable damage to the Nobel literature prize, both those who came before Elfriede Jelinek and those who came after her.

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

Only the TV sounds are real, they are the actual events. All the people around here experience the same things at the same time, except for some loner, who switches to the educational channel.

The Academy may not want to give the prize to another young author

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...

The moment workers can afford too little they rebel. The last time this was a real danger was 1950. Communists took advantage of supply problems and stirred up gullible people against their very own country.

When I write, I have always tried to be on the side of the weak. The side of the powerful is not literature’s side.

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

Money never goes out of fashion.

After this I cannot even formally remain in the Swedish Academy,

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against...