Quotes by Alberto Moravia

“When I sit at my table to write, I never know what its going to be until Im under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesnt. But I dont sit back waiting for it. I work every day.”

“There are many reasons for keeping a diary: to make a note of facts that one considers important; to open ones heart, to give vent to ones 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.”

“Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.”

“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.”

And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.

This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.

When you arent sincere you need to pretend, and by pretending you end up believing yourself; thats the basic principle of every faith.

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.

They say that, if we manage to live without too great an effort, it is entirely owing to the automatism which makes us unconscious of a great part of our movements. In order to take one single step, it seems, we displace an infinite number of muscles, and yet, thanks to this automatism, we are unaware of it. The same thing happens in our relations with other people.

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 cant defeat and I felt liberated.

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of ones 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.

I felt that the metal of my spirit, like a bar of iron that is softened and bent by a persistent flame, was being gradually softened and bent by the troubles that oppressed it. In spite of myself, I was conscious of a feeling of envy for those who did not suffer from such troubles, for the wealthy and the privileged; and this envy, I observed, was accompanied—still against my will—by a feeling of bitterness towards them, which, in turn, did not limit its aim to particular persons or situations, but, as if by an uncontrollable bias, tended to assume the general, abstract character of a whole conception of life. In fact, during those difficult days, I came very gradually to feel that my irritation and my intolerance of poverty were turning into a revolt against injustice, and not only against the injustice which struck at me personally but the injustice from which so many others like me suffered. I was quite aware of this almost imperceptible transformation of my subjective resentments into objective reflections and states of mind, owing to the bent of my thoughts which led always and irresistibly in the same direction: owing also to my conversation, which, without my intending it, alway harped upon the same subject. I also noticed in myself a growing sympathy for those political parties which proclaimed their struggle against the evils and infamies of the society to which, in the end I had attributed the troubles that beset me—a society which, as I thought, in reference to myself, allowed its best sons to languish and protected its worst ones. Usually, and in the simpler, less cultivated people, this process occurs without their knowing it, in the dark depths of consciousness where, by a kind of mysterious alchemy, egoism is transmuted into altruism, hatred into love, fear into courage; but to me, accustomed as I was to observing and studying myself, the whole thing was clear and visible, as though I were watching it happen in someone else; and yet I was aware the whole time that I was being swayed by material subjective factors, that I was transforming purely personal motives into universal reasons.

The dark realization came to him that a difficult and miserable age had begun for him, and he couldnt imagine when it would end. [Puberty]

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.

“This thought strengthened in me my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.”

“And we all know love is a glass which makes even a monster appear fascinating.”