I dreamt of being a writer once I started to read. I started to write 'Bonjour Tristesse' in bistros around the Sorbonne. I finished it, I sent it to editors. It was accepted.

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.

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.

To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.

There is a certain age when a woman must be beautiful to be loved, and then there comes a time when she must be loved to be beautiful.

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

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

One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter.

Art must take reality by surprise.

For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.

I always believe things are going to work out.

What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it's been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.

There is no cause to worry. The high tide of prosperity will continue.

There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.

When I was little, my mother taught me how to use a fork and knife. The trouble is that Mother forget to teach me how to stop using them!

If I see a spider in my house, I put it in a cup, and then I take it outside. I save it. What is wrong with me?

The oppposite of Love is not Hate - it's apathy.

I demand perfection in what I do, and I practice very hard before I give a concert-sometimes three to six hours a day.

Continuity was the kind of place where anybody who came into the city from out of town to deliver some work could come over and hang out and we'd go down and have a few drinks.

It is much easier to find fault with others, than to be faultless ourselves.