In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing

by Elena Ferrante

For a woman who has something to say, does it really take a miracle—I said to myself—to dissolve the margins within which nature has enclosed her and show herself in her own words to the world?

When I finished a story, I was pleased, having the impression that it had come out perfectly; and yet I felt that it wasn’t I who had written it—that is, not the excited I, ready for anything, who was called to write, and who during the entire draft had seemed to be hidden in the words—but another I, who, tightly disciplined, had found convenient pathways solely in order to say: look, see what fine sentences I’ve written, what beautiful images, the story is finished, praise me.

when I write, not even I know who I am.

It’s writing that keeps me diligently within the margins, starting from those red lines in the elementary-school notebooks.

true writing is that: not an elegant, studied gesture but a convulsive act.

writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up.

Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.

What we call “inner life” is a permanent flashing in the brain that wants to take shape as voice, as writing.

in a big city it can hardly happen twice in one day that someone’s words are understood in the same way as they are spoken.”

tell the thing as you will, I will listen as I can and believe as I am able.”

Reality was a game of illusion that to succeed had to pretend that no one had told it, no one had written it, and the real was there, reproduced so well that it made you forget even the marks of the alphabet.

The “genuine ‘real life,’” as Dostoyevsky called it, is an obsession, a torment for the writer. With greater or less ability we fabricate fictions not so that the false will seem true but to tell the most unspeakable truth with absolute faithfulness through the fiction.

we’ve reached a point where we almost regard “real life” as hard work, as a job, and we’ve all agreed in private that it’s really better in books.

clichés were once true sentences that dug a way out among clichés.

we are used to reading and writing too cautiously, we are cowards.