Quotes from Jean Anouilh

Fine-looking young chap, isn't he? Would have cut quite a dash as a dragoon but for his vocation as a virgin.

Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.

Life isn't what you think it is. It's like water, and the young let it trickle away between their fingers without even noticing. Cup your hands, keep it safe. Life eventually becomes something else, something hard, something simple, something you can hold in your hand and nibble on contentedly as you sit in the sun.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

They're crooked as corkscrews, the lot of them!

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy--common clay, if you like--eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people like you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others--the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.

When you're forty, half of you belongs to the past -- and when you're seventy, nearly all of you.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.

Beauty is one of the rare things that do not lead to doubt in God.

Inspiration is a trick that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books -- but it is terrible when one has to live it. It is almost impossible to sleep for more than twelve hours a day, and the remaining twelve hours have to be filled in somehow.

Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is.

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It's easy to say no, even if it means dying.

There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.

Believe me, all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

Madame Alexandra, if you don't open the door, I'll smash all your imitation china, I'll rip up your fake Persian rugs. Let me in, or it'll cost you a damn sight more than anything I want from you.

Life consists of nothing more than the happiness we can get out of it.

If you think I'm dressing up as your ecclesiastical secretary like the last time, it's a no go. I'm not wearing a cassock in this heat.

It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout--not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.

And under this carnival disguise the heart of an old youngster who is still waiting to give his all. But how to be recognized under this mask? This is what they call a fine career.

We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down.

This horror and all these useless gestures, this grotesque adventure is ours. We must live it. Death is absurd also.

Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it.