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I like to compare my method with that of painters centuries ago, proceeding from layer to layer.

Alberto Moravia

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Alberto Moravia
Age: 82 †
Born: 1907
Born: November 22
Died: 1990
Died: September 26
Author
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Film Director
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Politician
Screenwriter
Writer
The Eternal City
Alberto Pincherle
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More quotes by Alberto Moravia

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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.
Alberto Moravia
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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
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Alberto Moravia
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War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics.
Alberto Moravia
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The less one notices happiness, the greater it is.
Alberto Moravia
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I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality.
Alberto Moravia
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The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write.
Alberto Moravia
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Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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A writer survives in spite of his beliefs.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia
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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.
Alberto Moravia