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
The object of art is to give life shape.
My wife was an opera singer, you know. She bellowed her way through Wagner as a Valkyrie. I married her and made her give up the theatre, to my eternal cost. She was to go on acting for myself alone. A performance at his own expense, lasting for more than twenty years, tends to wear out your spectator.
Life is very nice, but it has no shape. The object of art is actually to give it some and to do it by every artifice possible-truer than the truth.
Death is beautiful. It alone gives love its true habitat.
Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
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.
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.
What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating
When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past . . . And when you are seventy, nearly all of you.
Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God.
All evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.
Every man thinks god is on his side.
Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?