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INTERVIEWER
You do not consider yourself a moralist, do you?
MORAVIA
No, I most emphatically do not. Truth and beauty are educatory in themselves. . . . Social criticism must necessarily, and always, be an extremely superficial thing. But don’t misunderstand me. Writers, like all artists, are concerned to represent reality, to create a more absolute and complete reality than reality itself. They must, if they are to accomplish this, assume a moral position, a clearly conceived political, social, and philosophical attitude; in consequence, their beliefs are, of course, going to find their way into their work. What artists believe, however, is of secondary importance, ancillary to the work itself. A writer survives in spite of his beliefs. Lawrence will be read whatever one thinks of his notions on sex. Dante is read in the Soviet Union.
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| Authors Mentioned |
| Charles Baudelaire, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Luigi Pirandello, Arthur Rimbaud, John Steinbeck, Honoré de Balzac, Giuseppe Belli, Giovanni Bocaccio, Calderón, Miguel de Cervantes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, Benedetto Croce, Dante, Charles Dickens, Denis Diderot, John Donne, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Christopher Fry, Nikolai Gogol, Carlo Goldoni, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Alessandro Manzoni, Guy de Maupassant, Jean Baptiste Molière, Eugene O'Neill, Petrarch, Edgar Allan Poe, Marcel Proust, François Rabelais, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Stendhal, Robert Louis Stevenson, Italo Svevo, Lope de Vega, Elio Vittorini, Voltaire, Virginia Woolf, Émile Zola |
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