Francoise Sagan (1935 – 2004)
Real name Françoise Quoirez, was a French dramatist, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter, most famous for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters.
She almost succeeded in inspiring the creation of the adjective 'saganesque', which one might translate as nostalgic and funny, deceptively frivolous and very lucid.
Lying stimulates one's imagination and ingenuity.
Just because life is inelegant doesn't mean we have to behave likewise.
She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Women believed in death. Without exception. It was part of their makeup. Whereas men refused to face up to it. Not only death, in fact, but life, too: a man, learning that his wife or girlfriend is pregnant, reacts like some beast of the field - "I can't believe it's true!" - while women look at the same situation as either happy news or a momentary inconvenience.
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.
Jazz music is a form of accelerated unconcern.
"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."
We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting.
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.
In love, as in finance, only the rich can get credit.
It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones.
No one is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love.
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.
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.
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.