A calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.
ELENA FERRANTECompetition 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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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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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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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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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The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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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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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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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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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTE