Writing for me is a dragnet that carries everything away with it: expressions and figures of speech, postures, feelings, thoughts, troubles. In short, the lives of others.
ELENA FERRANTEClimbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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In order not to cut out a large part of one’s private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
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My work stops at publication. If the books don’t contain in themselves their reasons for being – questions and answers – it means I was wrong to have them published.
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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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Women, in all fields – whether mothers or not – still encounter an extraordinary number of obstacles. They have to hold too many things together and often sacrifice their aspirations in the name of affections.
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I don’t have any special passion for politics, it being a never-ending merry-go-round of bosses big and small, all generally mediocre. I actually find it boring.
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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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Competition between women is good only if it does not prevail; that is to say if it coexists with affinity, affection, with a real sense of being mutually indispensable, with sudden peaks of solidarity in spite of envy, jealousy and the whole inevitable cohort of bad feelings.
ELENA FERRANTE