The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
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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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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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
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I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.
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Those who write need that “willing suspension of disbelief “, as Coleridge called it.
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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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We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
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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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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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Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
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Even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.
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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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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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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.
ELENA FERRANTE