Françoise Sagan Quotes

Money may not buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in a Jaguar than on a bus.

~ Françoise Sagan

Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.

~ Françoise Sagan

For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ Françoise Sagan

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ Françoise Sagan

There is a certain kind of stupidity reserved for women's dealings with men.

~ Françoise Sagan

He was stabbed by memory, that tyrant which impinges upon our dreams and leaps at out throat as soon as we awaken.

~ Françoise Sagan

We make our own symbols, after the event has passed and begun to spoil.

~ Françoise Sagan

What we love we may also despise.

~ Françoise Sagan

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else.

~ Françoise Sagan

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

~ Françoise Sagan

Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

~ Françoise Sagan

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

~ Françoise Sagan

his conscience washed clean by happiness.

~ Françoise Sagan

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 haveseen many who have gone the same way.

~ Françoise Sagan

Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ Françoise Sagan

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.

~ 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

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

~ Françoise Sagan

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

~ Françoise Sagan

Art must take reality by surprise.

~ Françoise Sagan

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you.

~ Françoise Sagan