Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Francoise Sagan

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I always believe things are going to work out.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

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

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

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.

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

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

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

Art must take reality by surprise.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

The happiness of others is never bearable for very long.

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

Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.

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.

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.

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

Love is worth whatever it costs.

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

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

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

happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement.

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

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.

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.

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