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
Some Similar Quotes
  1. Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion. - Red Haircrow

  2. What is your advice to young writers?” “Drink, fuck and smoke plenty of cigarettes. - Charles Bukowski

  3. Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth. - Stephen King

  4. No writing is wasted. Did you know that sourdough from San Francisco is leavened partly by a bacteria called lactobacillus sanfrancisensis? It is native to the soil there, and does not do well elsewhere. But any kitchen can become an ecosystem. If you bake a... - Erin Bow

  5. I hope I don't write TOO many books! When I look at authors who have written too many books, I wonder to myself "When did they live?" I certainly want to write BECAUSE I live! I know I don't want to write in order to... - C. Joybell C.

More Quotes By Elena Ferrante
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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...

  4. 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.

  5. 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...

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