Quotes from Francoise Sagan

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

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

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

pity is an agreeable sentiment, uplifting like military music.

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.

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

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

happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement.

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.

Art must take reality by surprise.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.