Natalia Ginzburg Quotes

(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well. I’ve read the major authors, but in Italian, not English. Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen. I hardly know contemporary American literature. The two American authors I love most, who are by now dead, alas, are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. And then I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing. But even before that Pavese was busy introducing us all to the great American writers.

Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it.

When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life.

(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me.

unfortunately, a great number of judges and social workers are rigidly unable to judge cases in a human way.

what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the strength, of a horse to pull ahead.

dialect is really impossible to translate adequately.

He knew how to find time to study and to write, to earn his living and to wander idly through the streets he loved; whereas we, who staggered from laziness to frantic activity and back again, wasted our time trying to decide whether we were lazy or industrious

Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water.

for a mistake, my God, you don’t make a child suffer!

Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.

I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute.

they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”

What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.

in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything.