Alberto Moravia

“Dictatorship is the form of government in which everybody is afraid of everybody else, and one man is afraid of them all.”

“Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.”

“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think about his illness.”

“Every true writer is a moralist.”

“Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat or violence or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after.”

“The writer's job is to tell the truth.”

“Love dies only when growth stops.”

“The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started.”

“Basically, I am a storyteller. I have no axes to grind. I am not a preacher.”

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.”

“We are what we are, and we have to be what we are.”

“Money has become the grand test of virtue.”

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.”

“The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.”

“Things are not what they seem, but what they are called.”

“The real novelist, the one who counts, is the one who is a born novelist.”