Françoise Sagan quotes - page 2

The fact that a woman you love reaches a point in the relationship where she ceases to love you, and despite that you can never bring yourself to scorn or despise her, is very rare indeed. (Françoise Sagan)
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
Françoise Sagan
Jazz music is a form of accelerated unconcern.
Françoise Sagan
I never make moral judgments. All I would say is that a person was droll, or gay, or, above all, a bore. Making judgments for or against my characters bores me enormously; it doesn't interest me at all. The only morality for a novelist is the morality of his esthétique.
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
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
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
Paul had always thought that women were never more serious than when they were naked.
Françoise Sagan
Edouard was trying to understand, to find out what he could have done to lose Beatrice's favor. He couldn't know that his unpardonable sin was the fact that he was too deserving.
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
When a man has dreamed of winning something by a colossal stroke of luck, he is prone to neglect petty but more practical ways of attaining it. (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
I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
Françoise Sagan
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
Just because life is inelegant doesn't mean we have to behave likewise.
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's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does.
Françoise Sagan
I can say everything to you. It's a wonderful feeling. I never could tell Francoise that I don't really love her, that our marriage isn't based on any hones ideal. It's founded on my weariness and boredom. Although those are solid enough bases. Plenty of lasting marriages are build on them, God knows. At least, they're always present.
Françoise Sagan
There is no such thing as an ideal man. The ideal man is the man you love at the moment.
Françoise Sagan
I always believe things are going to work out.
Françoise Sagan
One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter. (Françoise Sagan)
Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
Françoise Sagan
I had a strong desire to write and some free time.
Françoise Sagan
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.
Françoise Sagan
I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
Françoise Sagan