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Efriede Jelinek

The piano Teacher 1988 (Grove Press)Translated by Joachim Neugroschel

For the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine,

but control is better. P 5

Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place. P 23

Every child instinctively heads toward dirt and filth unless you pull it back. P

24

The artist is lonesome and admits his solitude. P 24

Of course, art turns many people away for there has to be a limit. The limits

between the gifted and the ungifted. P 27

There are no holidays for art; and thats just fine with the artist. P 29

Better to wear worn shoes than to polish the boots of shop owner. P 30

Forewarned is forearmed. P 32

Just keep following my tears, and the brook will take you in. p 44

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 arent 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, youll never find a

better friend that yourself. P 65

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 arethe majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle

together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If youre alone with nothing, and

certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs! P

66

First the masters died, now their music is dying, because people only want to

listen to pop, rock, and punk. P 69

A sensitive person gets burned, like a delicate moth. P 71

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. P 107

The criteria of art are the imponderable, the immeasurable. P 118

Art and order, the relative that refuse to relate. P 124 Beethovens 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 eludesform. 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. P 151

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When discussing Bachs 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. P159

Art is not a Trojan horse. P 260

Dont start anything you cant finish. P 274