Quotes by Jeanne Moreau

• 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?
• 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.
• It's dangerous to assert oneself.
• It's just as idiotic to say there is no life after death as it is to say there is one.
• Knowing how to die is knowing how to live. What is death anyway? It's the outcome of life.
• My aim in life is not to judge.
• My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.
• To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.
• You should not separate your life from what you do.
• 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.
• When Tony was madly in love with me, his relationship with Vanessa Redgrave was ending.
• 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.
• 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.
• When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can't ever start a work of art.
• To give and receive love, you have to be in touch with pain, you have to be capable of provoking it and feeling it.
• One thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you.
• Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story.
• Sometimes the directors were afraid of what they brought out of me.
• Something pretty... that's just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don't worry about it.
• 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.
• Some children I have met are very beautiful. Some children are imbeciles, vulgar, terrible.
• People's opinions don't interfere with me.
• To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.
• 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.
• 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 can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.
• Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.
• 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.
• All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.
• All those vitamins aren't to keep death at bay, they're to keep deterioration at bay.
• Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world.
• 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.
• 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.
• Being an actress is to be in tune with the fantasies of a man. What woman never dreamt of that?
• Beyond the beauty, the sex, the titillation, the surface, there is a human being. And that has to emerge.
• Characters who are on screen from start to finish are not necessarily the ones who have the greatest impact.
• Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.
• If you want to live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously.
• I can be intimidating, but not within the confines of a film shoot.
• 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 don't like the idea of separating life and work. That notion seems dated and a bit alien to me.
• 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.
• 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.
• I need, absolutely, to be alone.
• 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.