Francoise Sagan Quotes

The number of times she'd said "wait and see" to herself in her thirty years of existence was way beyond counting.

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

I realised that procrastination can rule our lives, yet not provide us with any arguments in its defence.

We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting.

He was in that stage of love–and of liquor–where one is completely taken up with oneself, and can get along very well without the other party.

What he does not yet understand is that whatever makes a woman strong is the reason that certain men will love her, even if behind her strengths there hide great weaknesses. This he will learn from You. He will learn that You are bubbly, funny, and sweet only because You have all Your weaknesses. But by then it will be too late.

To live, in fact, means resolve everything so you can be satisfied. And that is not so easy.

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

Only, when I am in bed, at dawn, when all that can be heard in Paris is the sound of cars, my memory betrays me: summer, with everything I remember of it, comes flooding back. Anne, Anne! I repeat that name very softly to myself, over and over in the dark. Then something stirs within me with eyes closed, I greet by its name, sadness: Bonjour tristesse.

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

It's strange: perhaps we should hate life to the end, so we could adore it in all it's shapes.

Summer fell upon Paris, with everyone still intently following his own subterranean course of passion or habit and looking up like a startled creature of the night at the blazing June sun. Now, all of a sudden, there was an impelling necessity to go away, to give a continuation or a meaning to the winter that had just gone by.

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

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

Nicole had put on weight. This is the effect which, in three cases out of four, unhappiness has upon women. The process of eating guarantees at least the health of the body.

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

Your idea of love is rather primitive. It's not a series of sensations, independent of each other ... It's something different ... a sense of loss ...

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

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

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

...at least, while the man is young, in this long cheating, which presents life, nothing seems desperately preferable than recklessness

Neither one of them hesitated to translate feeling into action, when an opportunity arose.

Childhood is a image, which we decorate.

When I was a child? Only the nostalgia for those days of utter, absolute irresponsibility, now long gone. But for her (and this she would never have admitted to anyone), those days weren't gone at all. She still felt totally irresponsible.

...life is a bitter joke, a prank. Accursed, drama and joke, which makes it funny. A laughable tragedy, that's what the life is.

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

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

Happiness is like a flat plain without landmarks.

Agreements are the strength of couples

The fame isn't something that comes up suddenly,; it comes in slowly. It comes out in a shape of fact, which, whoever is concerned, considers it significant

...impression is a pleasant feeling and enthralls like a military music. This shouldn't be my fault.

She said she didn't love him, and he said it didn't matter, and the poverty of their words brought tears to their eyes.

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.

How can someone love a women and not appreciate her, worship her and not believe in it, be crazy for her and not admire her? It can, surely! That's even more convenient, simpler.

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

Then we'll take the train to Paris tonight. There is a night train, isn't there? We'll catch it at Cannes.

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.

I always believe things are going to work out.

For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.

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

People get used to the faults of others when they don't believe it is their duty to correct them.

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

Then I realized that I had attacked a living, sensitive creature, not just an entity.

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

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.

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.

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

Whenever he had spoken of love, she had spoken of love's brief duration. 'A year, or even two months from now, you won't love me anymore.' Josée was the only person he knew who had a real consciousness of time. Everyone else, including himself, was driven by some very fundamental instinct to try, or pretend, to believe that love could last and solitude be dispelled forever.

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

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.

I've never drink so I could forget life, but to urge it.

God help us!' Josée thought. 'Here we have one of those regular biblical women! She thinks that a baby will win back her man.

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

Two human beings must be able to live, spasmodically clinging one to another, without breathing. That's is, then, called love

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.

What wall is that's always set between human beings and their deepest, terrible wishes for happiness? Is the picture of that happiness, which they shape in themselves and show, forever incompatible with their life? Is it a time or the absence of time? Is it still since childhood, nursed desire?

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

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

Happiness is always subject to slander.

In the name of the deceased, I charge you for letting the love pass by, for neglecting the duty to be happy, for living out of excuses, pretense and accepting with the fate. You should be condemned to death, but you'll be sentenced to solitude.

For what Luc was in fact proposing was just a game, an enticing game, but, even so, one that could destroy my undoubtedly quite genuine feelings for Bertrand; and it could destroy something else within me, something ill-defined but fiercely felt, which, whether I liked it or not, was opposed to transience. Or, at the very least, to the intentionally transient nature of what Luc what was offering. And then, even if I was able to conceive of any passion or liaison as being short-lived, I couldn't accept in advance that it had to be that way. Like any individual for whom life is a series of charades, I could bear the charades only if they were written by me, and by me alone.

his conscience washed clean by happiness.

Time, the only master whom he acknowledged, shattered his loves, his happiness, his anxiety, sometimes even his thoughts,s so there's no reason to break the chat: ,,that thing'. But ,,that thing' was colorless, nameless, and he didn't know what it is. Maybe time affects only on what we kno

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 had a strong desire to write and some free time.

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.

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.

I won't teach you to be unhappy. At least not intentionally. On the contrary, I'll strive not to make unhappy.

Life sometimes has his own truces. When it can look itself in the mirror, half smiling, loosened, half partnered, not asking for anything but to be alive and feel good in it's own skin, while listening the sound of the night bird. But those truces are rare: tigers, which live in various machines of our beings, wake up soon and start to tear each other apart.

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.

Even today I cannot get used to people who stare at me, while they are talking, or come very close to make sure that I am listening. My only thought is to escape. I go on saying "Yes" while gradually edging away. Their insistence and pertinency enrage me. What right have they to try to corner me?

What we love we may also despise.

...what are we looking or, if not to be liked? To this day I still don't know does that wish for conquest hide plenty of life strength, desire for power or secret, unconfirmed need to encourage and defend yourself.

Know this, sir, that for one women a specified time is a specified time. After a while sometimes is still time. But before a specified time there's never a time

I was going away, leaving behind me the villa, the garden and that summer.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The weight of money stops us to reach heights. It's a good servant, but a terrible master.

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

Imagination is more powerful than the fear of what would other think about ourselves

Pity is an agreeable sentiment, uplifting like military music.

To some women nothing fits better than the onset of ambition. Love makes them passive

He had always known that he was the lover and she was the object of love.

These moments of happiness, of belonging to life, if we remember them correctly, make some kind of cover, an invigorating ,,patchwork', which we put on our naked, skinny body, shivery of our solitude

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

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

Il arrive un âge où ils ne sont plus séduisants, ni «en forme», comme on dit. Ils ne peuvent plus boire et ils pensent encore aux femmes; seulement ils sont obligés de les payer, d'accepter des quantités de petites compromissions pour échapper à leur solitude. Ils sont bernés, malheureux. C'est ce moment qu'ils choisissent pour devenir sentimentaux et exigeants… J'en ai vu beaucoup devenir ainsi des sortes d'épaves.

"A time comes when they are no longer attractive or in good form. They can't drink any more, and they still hanker after women, only then they have to pay and make compromises in order to escape from their loneliness: they have become just figures of fun. They grow sentimental and hard to please. I have
seen many who have gone the same way.

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

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

I went to Luc's without much enthusiasm and even with some trepidation: I was going to have to chat, be friendly and project an image of myself to them. I would have preferred to have lunch on my own, twirl a jar of mustard round between my fingers, and be vague, vague, completely vague . . .

One partner is always more in love than the other.

Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.

...above else I was afraid of dullness, peace. To achieve our inner peace, my father and I needed an outer unrest

She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants ...

Cynicism always enchanted me by producing a delicious feeling of self-assurance and of being in league with myself

It's not worth loving... it needs to be loved

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.