Francoise Sagan Quotes

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality.

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

There is a certain age when a woman must be beautiful to be loved, and then there comes a time when she must be loved to be beautiful.

Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.

I have loved to the point of madness; That which is called madness, That which to me, Is the only sensible way to love.

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you.

I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.

Art must take reality by surprise.

Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.

For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.

I always believe things are going to work out.

People respect unhappiness and find it especially hard to forgive success.

Love is worth whatever it costs.

Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom.

If you treat life well, life is usually good to you. And I love life. There's a long-standing affair between us.

I think the best way to waste time is to try to save time.

For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.

Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.

There is no such thing as an ideal man. The ideal man is the man you love at the moment.

I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.

For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.

Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.

I was thinking that I should be content to kiss him until the break of day. Bertrand ran out of kisses too soon; desire made them superfluous in his eyes. They were only a stage on the road to pleasure, not something inexhaustible and self-sufficient, as Luc had revealed them to me.

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

You should celebrate the end of a love affair as they celebrate death in New Orleans, with songs, laughter, dancing and a lot of wine.

Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.

It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones.

I did not find him absurd. I saw he was kind, that he was on the verge of real love. I thought it would be nice for me to be in love with him, too.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement.

Marriage? It's like asparagus eaten with vinaigrette or hollandaise, a matter of taste but of no importance.

When you make a decision to write according to a set schedule and really stick to it, you find yourself writing very fast. At least I do.

After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.

A love affair based on jealousy is doomed from the start ... It is certanly a sign of love, but it's a sign that it's already dying.

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

The questions I would have liked to ask people were: ‘Are you in love? What are you reading?

The happiness of others is never bearable for very long.

We are torn between the craving to know and the despair of having known.

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of it's complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

What you call types of mind are only mental ages.

When man, Apollo man, rockets into space, it isn't in order to find his brother, I'm quite sure of that. It's to confirm that he hasn't any brothers.

Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.

Usually I avoided college students, whom I considered brutal, wrapped up in themselves, particularly in their youth, in which they found material for drama or an excuse for their own boredom. I did not care for young people.

It amused me to think that one can tell the truth when one is drunk and nobody will believe it.

curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

In love, as in finance, only the rich can get credit.

Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases.

I've often found myself preferring second-rate people to supposedly superior people, simply and solely because of their uncontrollable tendency to bang themselves against the sides of life's vast lampshade like fireflies or moths.