Jeanne Moreau

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it.

I need, absolutely, to be alone.

It’s dangerous to assert oneself.

What is amazing for a woman of my age is that I change as the world is changing-and changing very, very fast. I don’t think my mother had that opportunity to change.

If you want to live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously.

Some people are addicts. If they don’t act, they don’t exist.

Some gods may cross your path, but why should gods be beautiful? They could also be frightening.

My aim in life is not to judge.

You should not separate your life from what you do.

One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you.

Aging gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. Don’t worry girls, look like a wreck, that’s the way it goes.

I think more and more people want to live alone. You can be a couple without being in each other’s pockets. I don’t see why you have to share the same bathroom.

I don’t like going where I’ve already been. Life is a myriad of territories to discover. I don’t want to waste time with what I already know.

I am subject to very powerful lows. When you have highs, you have terrible lows. When you pinpoint that you are responsible for everything that happens to you, it is very frightening.

I gradually work myself into a frenzy as the shoot approaches, while we’re choosing the costumes or working with the make-up artist. I’m not so much interested in my character as the film itself.

As a matter of principle, I always come to a film like a blank slate, I don’t learn my lines in advance. With this approach, I feel clean.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

I don’t feel guilt. Whatever I wish to do, I do.

When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can’t ever start a work of art.

I can be intimidating, but not within the confines of a film shoot.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it’s what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

All those vitamins aren’t to keep death at bay, they’re to keep deterioration at bay.

My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.

I’m always amazed when young women who are having babies want their husbands to watch the babies come out. I would never allow anything like that.

My life is very exciting now. Nostalgia for what? It’s like climbing a staircase. I’m on the top of the staircase, I look behind and see the steps. That’s where I was. We’re here right now. Tomorrow, we’ll be someplace else. So why nostalgia?

Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.

Knowing how to die is knowing how to live. What is death anyway? It’s the outcome of life.

Something pretty… that’s just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don’t worry about it.

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

As long as you don’t make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that’s condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead.

When Tony was madly in love with me, his relationship with Vanessa Redgrave was ending.

It’s just as idiotic to say there is no life after death as it is to say there is one.

To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.

Characters who are on screen from start to finish are not necessarily the ones who have the greatest impact.

I can’t belong to groups. I’ve tried. I behave normally, but people don’t look at me normally.

Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world.

If you get trapped in the idea that what is most important is what image of yourself you’re giving to the world, you’re on a dangerous path.

I don’t think success is harmful, as so many people say. Rather, I believe it indispensable to talent, if for nothing else than to increase the talent.

Sometimes the directors were afraid of what they brought out of me.

You don’t have to be a wreck. You don’t have to be sick. One’s aim in life should be to die in good health. Just like a candle that burns out.

People’s opinions don’t interfere with me.

When I’m acting, I’m two beings. There’s the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.

Women will not talk about football unless one of them is in love with a football player, and then suddenly you discover that they know everything that is to be known about it.

Some children I have met are very beautiful. Some children are imbeciles, vulgar, terrible.

Being an actress is to be in tune with the fantasies of a man. What woman never dreamt of that?

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story.

I don’t like the idea of separating life and work. That notion seems dated and a bit alien to me.