Elena Ferrante Quotes

The rules say that to tell a story you need first of all a measuring stick, a calendar, you have to calculate how much time has passed between you and the facts, the emotions to be narrated.

The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose

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.

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, 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.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

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.

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.

I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.

I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.

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. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.

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.

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.

I 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.

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.

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.

Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.

We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.

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.

Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.

The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.

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.

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.

Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.

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.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.

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.

At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.

Elena Ferrante is the author of several novels. There is nothing mysterious about her, given how she manifests herself - perhaps even too much - in her own writing, the place where her creative life transpires in absolute fullness.