Francoise Sagan quotes:

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

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.

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

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

He lifted me up and held me close against him, my head on his shoulder. At that moment I loved him. In the morning light he was as golden, as soft, as gentle as myself, and he would protect me.

All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.

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

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

I always believe things are going to work out.

I don't think there's any intrinsic difference between a lover and a husband. ... If I were cynical, I would say that a woman should have both a good husband and a lover. But I'm not cynical so I'll just say that a woman should have a lover who's a good husband and a husband who's a good lover, perhaps both.

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.

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.

At night, time becomes a calm sea. It goes on for ever.

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

Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.

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.

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

I had a strong desire to write and some free time.

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.

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

his conscience washed clean by happiness.

What we love we may also despise.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I'm convinced she'll get away with it. It's the only way to get through life.

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.

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

Art must take reality by surprise.

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.

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

Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Love is worth whatever it costs.

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.

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.

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

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

Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.

He refused categorically all ideas of fidelity or serious commitments. He explained that they were arbitrary and sterile. From anyone else such views would have shocked me, but I knew that in his case they did not exclude tenderness and devotion - feelings which came all the more easily to him since he was determined that they should be transient.

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.

The happiness of others is never bearable for very long ...

What you call types of mind are only mental ages.

Life has confirmed for me the thoughts and impressions I had when I was 18, as if it was all intuition.

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

Illness is the opposite of freedom. It makes everything impossible.

happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement.

The happiness of people who are in love and who are loved shows in their faces. They have an expression that's at once very far away and very much part of the present.

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

No one, but no one, ever behaves 'well' in bed unless they love or are loved - two conditions seldom fulfilled.

Passion is the salt of life, and that at the times when we are under its spell this salt is indispensable to us, even if we have got along very well without it before.

It isn't common sense that is paramount in this world, it's wishful thinking.

I feel sorry for men. They have more problems than women, because they now have to compete with women.

One partner is always more in love than the other.

Houses are for private living, for friends, and for dogs.

There are moments when you feel trapped, ill at ease. A year later the same feeling can turn out to be the theme of a book.

Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little ... oh, I admit only a very little ... of what life is about.

It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand.

No one ever has time to examine himself honestly, and most people look no further than their neighbors' eyes, in which they may see their own reflection.

I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

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

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.

My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?

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

No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love.

The rich have a passion for bargains as lively as it is pointless.

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.

I found myself both touched and irritated by the discovery that she was vulnerable.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

no one talks about money more than people who have too much of it ...

pity is an agreeable sentiment, uplifting like military music.

Looking for pleasure is the best way to ensure you won't find it.

If you don't have imagination you're lost. But it's a virtue that's becoming increasingly rare, especially in its higher form: spontaneity. Mad, happy spontaneity.