Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.

I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.

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.

It's the people who love us or hate us - or both - who hold together the thousands of fragments we are made of.

The fictional treatment of biographical material - a treatment that for me is essential - is full of traps.

He was going through one of those moments that you read about in books, when a character reacts in an unexpectedly extreme way to the normal discontents of living.

Certainly something had happened to me during the night. Or after months of tension I had arrived at the edge of some precipice and now I was falling, as in a dream slowly, even as I continued to hold the thermometer in my hand, een as I stood with the soles of my slippers on the floor, even as I felt myself solidly contained by the expectant looks of my children. It was the fault of the torture that my husband had inflicted. But enough, I had to tear the pain from memory, I had to sandpaper away the scratches that were damaging my brain.