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
Jean Anouilh quotes about
Have you noticed that life, real honest to goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.
Rien n'est vrai que ce qu'on ne dit pas. Nothing is true except that which is unsaid.
In your efforts to dazzle us your reasoning has gone awry. You know very well that love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
Je sais de quelles petitesses meurent les plus grandes amours. I know how pettiness ruins the greatest loves.
Everything ends this way in France — everything. Weddings, christenings, duels, burials, swindlings, diplomatic affairs — everything is a pretext for a good dinner.
A genius knows how to make himself easily understood without being obvious about it.
A happy love is full of quarrels, you know.
Nobody has a more sacred obligation to obey the law than those who make the law.
The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.
One can be a patriot, you know, without making one's wife join the breadline.
Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?
Chacun de nous a un jour, plus ou moins triste, plus ou moins lointain, o u' il doit enfin accepter d'e" tre un homme. There will come a day for each of us, more or less sad, more or less distant, whenwe must accept the condition of being human.
Saintliness is also a temptation.