Elena Ferrante
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.Collection: Needs
It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.Collection: Hate
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.Collection: Real
I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Pain
The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a nooseCollection: Night
I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.Collection: Class
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.Collection: Mother
I didn't choose anonymity.Instead, I chose absence.Collection: Absence
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.Collection: Dream
I think our sexuality is all yet to be recounted and that the rich male literary tradition constitutes a huge obstacle.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Queens
We lie in order to tolerate our existence and, most of all, we lie to ourselves.Collection: Lying
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.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Games
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.Collection: Cutting
Anonymity lets me concentrate exclusively on writing.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Memories
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.Collection: Affluence
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.Collection: Writing
Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.Collection: Examination
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.Collection: Girl
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.Collection: Book
Climbing the economic ladder has been very hard for me; I still feel a great deal of guilt towards those I left behind.Collection: Climbing
The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.Collection: Essentials
Those who write need that "willing suspension of disbelief ", as Coleridge called it.Collection: Writing
At most, I may write when I am disturbed by something. I have recently discovered the pleasure of finding written answers to written questions.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Writing