The fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTEThe fictional treatment of biographical material – a treatment that for me is essential – is full of traps.
ELENA FERRANTEWe lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.
ELENA FERRANTEIt’s the people who love us or hate us – or both – who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.
ELENA FERRANTEMy 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.
ELENA FERRANTEI think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.
ELENA FERRANTEAt most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.
ELENA FERRANTEHe 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.
ELENA FERRANTEI 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.
ELENA FERRANTEThe rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick.
ELENA FERRANTEThe essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.
ELENA FERRANTEI 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.
ELENA FERRANTEI believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.
ELENA FERRANTEThere 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.
ELENA FERRANTEAs 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.
ELENA FERRANTEAnonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.
ELENA FERRANTEWriting 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.
ELENA FERRANTE