Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilhwas a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's Vichy government. One of France's most prolific writers after World War II, much of Anouilh's work deals with themes of maintaining integrity in a world of moral compromise...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth23 June 1910
CountryFrance
Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.
Saintliness is also a temptation.
It is restful, tragedy, because one knows that there is no more lousy hope left. You know you're caught, caught at last like a rat with all the world on its back. And the only thing left to do is shout - not moan, or complain, but yell out at the top of your voice whatever it was you had to say. What you've never said before. What perhaps you don't even know till now.
What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating
I don't want people to love me. It makes for obligations.
The true masters of the art of living are already happy...
The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.
Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes
Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy - and that is life.
Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.
God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies.
Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
Life has a way of setting things in order and leaving them be. Very tidy, is life.
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.