"We are always more disposed to laugh at nonsense than at genuine wit; because the nonsense is more agreeable to us, being more comformable to our own natures: fools love folly, and wise men wisdom."

"I confess I should be glad if my pleasures were as pleasing to God as they are to me: in that case, I should often find matter for rejoicing."

"Men are so accustomed to lie, that one can not take too many precautions before trusting them — if they are to be trusted at all."

"He who knows his incapacity, knows something."

"The woman who does not choose to love should cut the matter short at once, by holding out no hopes to her suitor."

"If you really want to know, I'd rather not have been born at all. I find life very tiring. The thing's done now, of course, and I can’t alter it. But there will always be this regret at the back of my mind, I shall never quite be able to get rid of it, and it will spoil everything. The thing to do now is to grow old quickly, to eat up the years as fast as possible, looking neither right nor left."

"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."

"Lying stimulates one's imagination and ingenuity."

"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."

"Paul had always thought that women were never more serious than when they were naked."

"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."

""One must cherish one's effigies, if one can tolerate them, perhaps more lovingly than one cherishes one's intrinsic self." That's the ABC of pride. And of humor."

"Just because life is inelegant doesn't mean we have to behave likewise."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Her life was like a whirlwind... Generous, inspired, quick, rebellious, unclassifiable, inimitable... We loved Sagan, even if we had not read her books or no longer read them … Sagan was more than just Sagan, more than a writing phenomenon: a writer, a woman, an era. …She rushed through her life and her books at full speed, without ever taking herself seriously."

"She almost succeeded in inspiring the creation of the adjective 'saganesque', which one might translate as nostalgic and funny, deceptively frivolous and very lucid."

"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 is more conventional than a woman who is falling out of love."

"Unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly."

"Curiosity is the beginning of all wisdom."

"In love, as in finance, only the rich can get credit."

"She clearly does not enjoy being interviewed or asked to articulate in a formal way what are, to her, natural assumptions about her writing. She is sincere and helpful, but questions that are pompous or elaborate, or about personal life, or that might be interpreted as challenging her work, are liable to elicit only a simple “oui” or “non,” or “je ne sais pas— je ne sais pas du tout” — and then an amused, disconcerting smile."

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

"She'd like to be indispensable; that's what every woman wants..."

"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."

"Jazz music is a form of accelerated unconcern."

"We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting."

"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."

"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 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."

"It's not doubt that drives people crazy, it's certainty that does."

"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."

"No one, but no one, ever behaves "well" in bed unless they love or are loved — two conditions seldom fulfilled."

"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."

"Love is worth whatever it costs."

"I don’t search for exactitude in portraying people. I try to give to imaginary people a kind of veracity. It would bore me to death to put into my novels the people I know. 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."

"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."

"It is healthier to see the good points of others than to analyze our own bad ones."

"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."

"The second romantics are true seers: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de Banville. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead."

"L'art pour l'art signifie, pour les adeptes, un travail dégagé de toute préoccupation autre que celle du beau en lui-même."

"Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer."

"Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe."