Elena Ferrante Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.
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One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
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There are no rules to writing a song.
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Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.
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I'm very physical. When I'm writing, I'm playing all the parts; I'm saying the lines out loud, and if I get excited about something - which doesn't happen very often when I'm writing, but it's the greatest feeling when it does - I'll be out of the chair and walking around, and if I'm at home, I'll find myself two blocks from my house.
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There's sketch, improv, writing, acting, music, and badminton. Those are the seven forms of comedy. But I do like the idea of being an auteur in the sense of writing and being in your own stuff.
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I'm not happy when I'm writing, but I'm more unhappy when I'm not.
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'Divergent' was my utopian world. I mean, that wasn't the plan. I never even set out to write dystopian fiction, that's just what I had when I was finished. At the beginning, I was just writing about a place I found interesting and a character with a compelling story, and as I began to build the world, I realized that it was my utopia.
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When I was in college at Carnegie Mellon, I wanted to be a chemist. So I became one. I worked in a laboratory and went to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I taught science at a private girls' school. I had three children and waited until all three were in school before I started writing.
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I enjoy writing. Publishing... not so much. I've been lucky to work with some very talented people in the publishing world, and the print industry has allowed me to write full time.
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I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.
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Writing for the theatre is so different to writing for anything else. Because what you write is eventually going to be spoken. That's why I think so many really powerful novelists can't write a play - because they don't understand that it's spoken - that it hits the air. They don't get that.
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Writing is like carrying a fetus.
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'E.T.' was the movie that made me want to make movies in the first place, and it was the first movie that made me focus on writing instead of what happens in the movie.
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Hawkesworth said of Johnson, 'You have a memory that would convict any author of plagiarism in any court of literature in the world.'
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It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefoot friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
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I love to direct! I get really jazzed by directing, but directing is not the same kind of personal expression, the same kind of personal intimate expression that writing is. Because when you're directing, you're basically managing, basically getting out of people doing their job, except when you see them going astray.
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Yeah, I've been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.
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People shout out for songs and I don't even remember writing them.
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You know that saying, 'You broke it, you bought it'? With horses, if you don't make sure it's a good fit... they tend to break you.
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I was just a cheap little starlet hardly acting at all in a very mediocre film.
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It seems to me that we often commit ourselves wholly to something while knowing almost nothing concrete about it. Another word for that, I suppose, is 'faith.'
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Years on, Christine and John still have a deep love for each other, as do Stevie and I - we've been working together since I was 17.
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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.
