Françoise Sagan Quotes

70 Sourced Quotes

For me 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.

Françoise Sagan
To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

Françoise Sagan
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. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the real as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called realist novels — they're nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all.

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

Françoise Sagan
She wasn't afraid of dying, for to die is nothing in itself, no more than cutting a final wisdom tooth.

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

Françoise Sagan
Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.

Françoise Sagan
I have nothing against drugs, but alcohol suits me and the rest frightens me.

Françoise Sagan
Pity is an agreeable sentiment, uplifting like military music.

Françoise Sagan
Very broadly, I think one writes and rewrites the same book. I lead a character from book to book, I continue along with the same ideas. Only the angle of vision, the method, the lighting, change.

Françoise Sagan
The wealthy had a passion for bargains as lively as it was pointless.

Françoise Sagan
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.

Françoise Sagan
Desire, even the basest, kind, required the notion of futurity if it was ever to come off. A man without a future, a dying man, was no longer desirable. And however stupid such a reaction might have seemed, Paul knew that if the situation was ever reversed, he would feel the same way about the woman. Desire would have turned into compassion. Which is tantamount to saying that desire would vanish into thin air.

Françoise Sagan
No one talks about money more than people who have too much of it.

Françoise Sagan
I always believe that things are going to work out. It's in my nature. Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I'm convinced she'll get away with it.

Françoise Sagan
One is never free except in relation to someone else. And when, the relation is based on happiness, it allows the greatest freedom in the world.

Françoise Sagan
No one, but no one, ever behaves "well" in bed unless they love or are loved — two conditions seldom fulfilled.

Françoise Sagan
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.

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

Françoise Sagan
Could you love a woman you didn't respect? Could you worship someone without believeing in her? Could you be madly in love with a woman you didn't admire? Well, you could. Not only that, it might be better that way. Easier. It took Paul almost forty years to learn that carnal platitude. Nevertheless, he always took Sonia to dinners where, sooner or later, her stupidity would explode, with the result that brighter souls would inevitably pick up on it right away and cast a sympathetic, albeit ironical, look in his direction, which only excited him all the more.

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

Françoise Sagan
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.

Françoise Sagan
Illness is the opposite of freedom. It makes everything impossible. You lose so many things when you're ill.

Françoise Sagan
The ways of love are all the same, whether infantile, childish, sexual, tender, sadistic, erotic, or whispered. It's simply a question of understanding, of understanding oneself above all: in bed, in broad daylight, madly or not at all, in shadow, in sunlight, in despair or at table. Otherwise, it's no use. Any of it. And the little time we have left for living, while we're still alive, in other words capable of giving pleasure, and the little time we have left for thinking (or pretending to) in this vast, mindless cacophony that daily life has become, ineluctable, uncontrollable, and truly unacceptable to any civilized person, we must make absolutely certain that we share.

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

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

Françoise Sagan
"One must cherish one's effigies, if one can tolerate them, perhaps more lovingly than one cherishes one's intrinsic self." That's the ABC of pride. And of humor.

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

Françoise Sagan
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.

Françoise Sagan
Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.

Françoise Sagan