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 ab….

Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic..

I don't think it's possible to write a good novel around a negative personality..

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

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 i….

It is what we are forced to do that forms our character, not what we do of our own free will..

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

Because the world to-day 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. ….

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 ev….

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 ….

The ratio of literacy to illiteracy is constant, but nowadays the illiterates can read and write..

The novel as we knew it in the nineteenth century was killed off by Proust and Joyce..

The less one notices happiness, the greater it is..

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..

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….

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

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 falsifyin….

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitali….

I do not foresee a time when I shall feel that I have nothing to say..

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 ….

War has become an affair of machines...and soldiers are little more than clever mechanics..