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 FERRANTEThe fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable.
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It’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
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A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
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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 circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories…The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.
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Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.
ELENA FERRANTE