A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
ELENA FERRANTEThose who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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.
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He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.
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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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As a girl – twelve, thirteen years old – I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.
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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
ELENA FERRANTE -
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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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.
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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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I have always paid careful attention to social and economic conflicts, to the dialectic – if we can call it that – between high and low. Maybe it’s because I was not born or brought up in affluence.
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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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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.
ELENA FERRANTE






