Top 100 Francoise Sagan Quotes
#1. He was stabbed by memory, that tyrant which impinges upon our dreams and leaps at out throat as soon as we awaken.
Francoise Sagan
#2. I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.
Francoise Sagan
#3. Usually I avoided college students, whom I considered brutal, wrapped up in themselves, particularly in their youth, in which they found material for drama or an excuse for their own boredom. I did not care for young people.
Francoise Sagan
#4. Looking for pleasure is the best way to ensure you won't find it.
Francoise Sagan
#5. We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting.
Francoise Sagan
#6. Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.
Francoise Sagan
#7. Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer from it that increases.
Francoise Sagan
#8. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#9. Illness is the opposite of freedom. It makes everything impossible.
Francoise Sagan
#10. Every time I see a film about Joan of Arc I'm convinced she'll get away with it. It's the only way to get through life.
Francoise Sagan
#11. He lifted me up and held me close against him, my head on his shoulder. At that moment I loved him. In the morning light he was as golden, as soft, as gentle as myself, and he would protect me.
Francoise Sagan
#12. I found myself both touched and irritated by the discovery that she was vulnerable.
Francoise Sagan
#13. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#15. Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.
Francoise Sagan
#16. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#17. It amused me to think that one can tell the truth when one is drunk and nobody will believe it.
Francoise Sagan
#18. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#19. Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.
Francoise Sagan
#21. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#22. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#23. Houses are for private living, for friends, and for dogs.
Francoise Sagan
#24. After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent.
Francoise Sagan
#25. If you treat life well, life is usually good to you. And I love life. There's a long-standing affair between us.
Francoise Sagan
#26. Happiness has always seemed to me a great achievement.
Francoise Sagan
#27. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#28. Only by pursuing the extremes in one's nature, with all its contradictions, appetites, aversions, rages, can one hope to understand a little ... oh, I admit only a very little ... of what life is about.
Francoise Sagan
#30. I realised that procrastination can rule our lives, yet not provide us with any arguments in its defence.
Francoise Sagan
#31. He had always known that he was the lover and she was the object of love.
Francoise Sagan
#32. My love of pleasure seems to be the only consistent side of my character. Is it because I have not read enough?
Francoise Sagan
#33. No one, but no one, ever behaves 'well' in bed unless they love or are loved - two conditions seldom fulfilled.
Francoise Sagan
#34. We are born crying, and for good reason,' he reflected. 'And the rest of our lives is bound to be a muted reiteration of that cry.
Francoise Sagan
#35. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#37. The number of times she'd said "wait and see" to herself in her thirty years of existence was way beyond counting.
Francoise Sagan
#38. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#39. She wasn't a courtesan, nor an intellectual, nor the mother of a family - she was nothing at all. And
Francoise Sagan
#40. There is no such thing as an ideal man. The ideal man is the man you love at the moment.
Francoise Sagan
#41. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#42. For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.
Francoise Sagan
#45. At night, time becomes a calm sea. It goes on for ever.
Francoise Sagan
#47. The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.
Francoise Sagan
#48. The happiness of others is never bearable for very long ...
Francoise Sagan
#49. We make our own symbols, after the event has passed and begun to spoil.
Francoise Sagan
#51. For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.
Francoise Sagan
#52. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#53. Thirty-year-old children who refused to act like grown-ups.
Francoise Sagan
#54. It isn't common sense that is paramount in this world, it's wishful thinking.
Francoise Sagan
#55. For with the complete disappearance of my boredom, to which I had not dared to give a name, I had changed for the better.
Francoise Sagan
#56. I feel sorry for men. They have more problems than women, because they now have to compete with women.
Francoise Sagan
#57. I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Francoise Sagan
#58. She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants ...
Francoise Sagan
#59. Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.
Francoise Sagan
#60. Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
Francoise Sagan
#61. Neither one of them hesitated to translate feeling into action, when an opportunity arose.
Francoise Sagan
#63. Sometimes I belonged to the pure and beautiful race of nomads, and at others to the poor withered breed of hedonists.
Francoise Sagan
#64. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#65. Pity is an agreeable sentiment, uplifting like military music.
Francoise Sagan
#66. The rich have a passion for bargains as lively as it is pointless.
Francoise Sagan
#67. I think the best way to waste time is to try to save time.
Francoise Sagan
#68. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#69. Then we'll take the train to Paris tonight. There is a night train, isn't there? We'll catch it at Cannes.
Francoise Sagan
#70. It is a known fact that every man's heart is set on having a daughter.
Francoise Sagan
#71. For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.
Francoise Sagan
#72. All my life, I will continue obstinately to write about love, solitude and passion among the kind of people I know. The rest don't interest me.
Francoise Sagan
#73. It would be bad form for me to describe people I don't know and don't understand.
Francoise Sagan
#75. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#76. Marriage? It's like asparagus eaten with vinaigrette or hollandaise, a matter of taste but of no importance.
Francoise Sagan
#77. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#78. A love affair based on jealousy is doomed from the start ... It is certanly a sign of love, but it's a sign that it's already dying.
Francoise Sagan
#79. I did not find him absurd. I saw he was kind, that he was on the verge of real love. I thought it would be nice for me to be in love with him, too.
Francoise Sagan
#80. When man, Apollo man, rockets into space, it isn't in order to find his brother, I'm quite sure of that. It's to confirm that he hasn't any brothers.
Francoise Sagan
#81. People respect unhappiness and find it especially hard to forgive success.
Francoise Sagan
#83. There is a certain kind of stupidity reserved for women's dealings with men.
Francoise Sagan
#84. I've read Proust and Stendhal. That keeps you in your place.
Francoise Sagan
#86. Writing takes a pen, a sheet of paper and, to start with, just the shadow of an idea.
Francoise Sagan
#87. I was thinking that I should be content to kiss him until the break of day. Bertrand ran out of kisses too soon; desire made them superfluous in his eyes. They were only a stage on the road to pleasure, not something inexhaustible and self-sufficient, as Luc had revealed them to me.
Francoise Sagan
#88. I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.
Francoise Sagan
#89. 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.
Francoise Sagan
#90. A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you
Francoise Sagan
#91. He knew this euphoria of hers: it was the euphoria of being alone.
Francoise Sagan
#92. Cynicism always enchanted me by producing a delicious feeling of self-assurance and of being in league with myself
Francoise Sagan
#93. No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love.
Francoise Sagan
#94. I liked to feel his desire. On the other hand, I didn't like myself. That type of wild, cold little girl - "I have white teeth and a black heart" - seemed to me playacting for old gentlemen.
Francoise Sagan
#95. It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones.
Francoise Sagan
#96. We are torn between the craving to know and the despair of having known.
Francoise Sagan
#97. Life has confirmed for me the thoughts and impressions I had when I was 18, as if it was all intuition.
Francoise Sagan
#99. I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.
Francoise Sagan
#100. 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 ...
Francoise Sagan
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
