I felt squeezed in that vise along with the mass of everyday things and people, and I had a bad taste in my mouth, a permanent sense of nausea that exhausted me, as if everything, thus compacted, and always tighter, were grinding me up, reducing me to a repulsive cream.

— Elena Ferrante

I felt that not only in my book but in novels in general there was something that truly agitated me, a bare and throbbing heart. . . But was that what I wanted? To write, to write with purpose, to write better than I had already? And to study the stories of the past and the present to understand how they worked, and to learn, learn everything about the world with the sole purpose of constructing living hearts. . .

— Elena Ferrante

I'm lying, yes, but why do you force me to give a linear explanation; linear explanations are almost always lies.

— Elena Ferrante

I simply decided once and for all to liberate myself from the anxiety of notoriety and the urge to be a part of that circle of successful people, those who believe they have won who-knows-what

— Elena Ferrante

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

— Elena Ferrante

I soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn't excite me, only what Lila touched became important.

— Elena Ferrante

I think of writing now as a long, tiring, pleasant seduction. The stories that you tell, the words that you use and refine, the characters you try to give life to are merely tools with which you circle around the elusive, unnamed, shapeless thing that belongs to you alone, and which nevertheless is a sort of key to all the doors, the real reason that you spend so much of your life sitting at a table tapping away, filling pages.

— Elena Ferrante

It seemed to me - articulated in words of today - that not only did she know how to put things well, but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and naturally charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected with energy. But I also realized, with pleasure, that, as soon as she began to do this, I felt able to do the same, and I tried and it came easily.

— Elena Ferrante

It's only and always the two of us who are involved, she who wants me to give her what nature and circumstances kept, I who can't give what she demands; she who gets angry at my inadequacy and out of spite wants to reduce me to nothing, as she has done with herself, I who have written for months and months to give her a form whose boundaries won't dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn, calm myself.

— Elena Ferrante

It was during that journey to Via Radio that I began to be made unhappy by my own plainness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them, I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some ways diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car. They were my friends, of course, my boyfriend was there, we were going to Lila’s wedding celebration. But that very celebration confirmed that Lila, the only person I still felt was essential even though our lives had diverged, no longer belonged to us and, without her, every intermediary between me and those youths, that car racing through the streets, was gone. Why then wasn’t I with Alfonso, with whom I shared both origin and flight? Why, above all, hadn’t I stopped to say to Niño, Stay, come to the reception, tell me when the magazine with my article’s coming out, let’s talk, let’s dig ourselves a cave that can protect us from Pasquale’s driving, from his vulgarity, from the violent tones of Carmela and Enzo, and also—yes, also—of Antonio?

— Elena Ferrante