Alberto Moravia Quotes
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Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
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When you aren't sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; that's the basic principle of every faith.
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In principio, dunque, era la noia, volgarmente chiamata caos. Iddio, annoiandosi della noia, creò la terra, il cielo, l'acqua, gli animali, le piante, Adamo ed Èva; i quali ultimi, annoiandosi a loro volta in paradiso, mangiarono il frutto proibito. Iddio si annoiò di loro e li cacciò dall'Eden.
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Un male incerto provoca inquietudine, perché, in fondo, si spera fino all'ultimo che non sia vero; ma un male sicuro, invece, infonde per qualche tempo una squallida tranquillità.
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...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.
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Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation in turn becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources - and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on in the future.
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You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.
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War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.
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There are many reasons for keeping a diary: to make a note of facts that one considers important; to open one's heart, to give vent to one's feelings, to make confessions; from the instinct of economy which sometimes encourages a writer to make good use of even the smallest crumbs of his life, so that he may have one more book to publish; or again from vanity and self- satisfaction.
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Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.
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Because the world today is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes – into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!
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It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.
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Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.
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The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
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The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
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Modern man-whether in the womb of the masses, or with his workmates, or with his family, or alone-can never for one moment forget that he is living in a world in which he is a means and whose end is not his business.
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An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.
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When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.
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The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.
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A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.
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I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.
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I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say.
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In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.
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Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.