Top 26 Alberto Moravia Quotes
#1. It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will.
Alberto Moravia
#2. I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say.
Alberto Moravia
#3. Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Alberto Moravia
#4. Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.
Alberto Moravia
#5. I gave up the unequal struggle against what appeared to be in my fate, indeed, I welcomed it with more affection. As one embraces a foe one can't defeat and I felt liberated.
Alberto Moravia
#6. War has become an affair of machines ... and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.
Alberto Moravia
#7. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#8. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#9. You can't think on purpose about somebody or something. Either you think about them naturally or you don't think at all.
Alberto Moravia
#10. Every true writer is like a bird; he repeats the same song, the same theme, all his life. For me, this theme as always been revolt.
Alberto Moravia
#11. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#12. The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
Alberto Moravia
#13. The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia
#14. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#16. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#17. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#18. This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.
Alberto Moravia
#19. And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.
Alberto Moravia
#20. The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldn't imagine when it would end. [Puberty]
Alberto Moravia
#21. Desire for normality; a longing to adapt to some recognized and general rule; a wish to be like everyone else, from the moment that being different meant being guilty.
Alberto Moravia
#22. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#23. I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.
Alberto Moravia
#25. 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.
Alberto Moravia
#26. I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.
Alberto Moravia
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