Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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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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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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor.
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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 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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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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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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I no longer protect myself from the world I grew up in. Rather, today I try to protect the feelings I have for that world, the emotional space where my desire to write first took hold, and still grows.
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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 think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTE