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

I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love.

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

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

I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.

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.

Whisky, gambling and Ferraris are better than housework.

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.

I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.

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

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

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

What we love we may also despise.

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.

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

Curiosity is the beginning of wisdom.

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

his conscience washed clean by happiness.

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.

Nothing brings on jealousy like laughter.

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.

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.

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.

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.