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."

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

"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 …"

"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."

"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 pr…"

"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 li…"

"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."

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