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
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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Gustave Flaubert
Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. You can't control life, at least you can control your version.
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Chuck Palahniuk
In order to write about life first you must live it.
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Ernest Hemingway
We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing - an actor, a writer - I am a person who does things - I write, I act - and I never know what I'm going to do next. I think you can...
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Stephen Fry
More Quotes By Elena Ferrante
How quickly people changed, with their interests, their feelings. Well-made phrases replaced by well-made phrases, time is a flow of words coherent only in appearance, the one who piles up the most is the one who wins.
The solitude of women's minds is regrettable, I said to myself, it's a waste to be separated from each other without procedures, without tradition.
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...
Don’t be timid. You’re a writer, use your role, test it, make something of it. These are decisive times, everything is turning upside down. Participate, be present. And begin with the scum in your area, put their backs to the wall.
I didn’t realize that in his wish to transform me was the proof that he didn’t like me as I was, he wanted me to be different, or, rather, he didn’t want just a woman, he wanted the woman he imagined he himself would be...
