Art & Creativity Quote by Elfriede Jelinek

A refusal that doubles as a power move: Jelinek disavows the spotlight while quietly reclaiming the only stage she trusts - the page. The line has the cadence of a flinch ("I just can't"), then immediately swivels into a conditional offer ("if I may") that sounds polite but functions like a boundary. She isn't begging off; she's negotiating the terms of visibility.

The subtext is an indictment of a culture that treats the author as an on-demand personality. "Public attention" here isn't neutral recognition; it's the hungry apparatus of interviews, ceremonies, profiles, the expectation that a woman artist must be legible, agreeable, available. Jelinek's work has long targeted how institutions package bodies and voices, and this quip exposes the same mechanism aimed at her: attention as extraction. Her answer is to redirect the transaction toward writing - a medium where she can be present without being consumed.

There's also a sly reversal of authority. The public assumes the right to access the artist; Jelinek counters with a different access point: language, constructed and controlled. "I might write something instead" sounds modest, almost throwaway, but it asserts that her real participation in public life is textual, not performative. For a playwright, it's especially barbed: theater is public by definition, yet she suggests the most honest way to meet an audience is indirectly, through the work, not through the author-as-spectacle.

Context matters: Jelinek has been notably averse to appearances, and the line reads like a critique of the celebrity-adjacent literary economy. It's not shyness as personality trait; it's resistance as method.