Jean Anouilh Quotes

I like reality. It tastes like bread.

All children are sweet at five. But at twelve they begin to get silly.

Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.

Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write.

Life is a child playing round your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.

Nothing is true but what is never said.

One cannot weep for the entire world, it is beyond human strength. One must choose.

I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life
that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness
provided a person doesn't ask much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die!

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.

Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute! Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Only engage, and then the mind grows heated. Begin, and then the work will be completed.

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

What will my happiness be like? What kind of happy woman will Antigone grow into? What base things will she have to do, day after day, in order to snatch her own little scrap of happiness? Tell me – who will she have to lie to? Smile at? Sell herself to? Who will she have to avert her eyes from, and leave to die?

There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will keep me from being happy.

All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

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

When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past ... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.

What you get free costs too much.

Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors. If they only knew that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.

In matters of money there's no such thing as enough.

Every man thinks god is on his side.

What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating.

The garden was still asleep. I caught it unawares. A garden that hasn't yet begun to think about people. Beautiful.

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.

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.

Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

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

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

You disgust me, all of you, with your happiness! With your life that must be loved at all costs. [ ... ] I spit on your idea of life! [ ... ] You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell! [ ... ] I do not want to understand. I am here for something other than understanding. I am here to tell you no, and to die. To tell you no and to die.

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.

The object of art is to give life shape.

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

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know ... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

What is this mania to love someone all one's life ? Why should we?

The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job . . . The rest is automatic. You don't need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order; it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction . . . Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless . . . In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility . . . Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped.

I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.

A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.

God! Is there anything uglier than a frightened man!

Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas. Nothing is true except that which is unsaid.

Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.

Death has to be waiting at the end of the ride before you truly see the earth, and feel your heart, and love the world.

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 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

Il y aura toujours un chien perdu quelque part qui m'empe" chera d'e" tre heureux. There will always be a lost dog somewhere that will prevent me being happy.

Inspiration? - a hoax fabricated by poets for their self-importance.

Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.

Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path.

Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?

Obligations, hatreds, injuries; what did I expect my memories to be? I was forgetting remorse. Now I have a complete past.

Everything ends this way in France - everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs - everything is a pretext for a good dinner.

A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.