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 FERRANTEI 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.
More Elena Ferrante Quotes
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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 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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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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I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
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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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The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose
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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 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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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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I didn’t choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.
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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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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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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 FERRANTE