“Like Kierkegaard said, if man is not desperate, he should be. But he must live with it, not die. That seems right to me. I’m against suicide. I favor the Stoic idea that one must live with desperation. It’s also a Christian thing. A real Christian must be desperate. To accept being desperate is not a compromise. It means to live in desperation. To accept desperation means simply not to kill oneself. It doesn’t mean to live in peace. Desperation is a serious matter and requires a certain amount of play-acting as a way to live with desperation. The main thing is not to bother others.”

(From an interview with Alberto Moravia by Gaither Stewart, quoted in an article in Critique which seems to have lost most of its header information. Other pieces by him there: interviews with Dacia Maraini, Federico Fellini, Umberto Eco, and Natalia Ginzburg, as well as a piece on the Etruscans.)