Jeanne Moreau Quotes

Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I'm finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden.

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

I shall die very young...maybe seventy, maybe eighty, maybe ninety. But I shall be very young.

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.

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

I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.

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.

To be free means to choose, whose slave you want to be. ­

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

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

For me it's not possible to forget, and I don't understand people who, when the love is ended, can bury the other person in hatred or oblivion. For me, a man I have loved becomes a kind of brother.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

To me age is a number, just a number. Who cares?

The life you had is nothing. It is the life you have that is important.

In making dinner for a friend, don't forget the love.

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

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

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

My aim in life is not to judge.

Every night I go over what I did in the day, in ethical or moral terms. Have I treated people properly? Did I tell the truth?

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

During rehearsals I am confronted by things very mysterious. I have terrific fights with inner demons, and it's more painful than it ever was.

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

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

If you're extremely, painfully frightened of age, it shows.

It's a fantastic thing to take the risk of getting so close to your desire, expressing your obsession so absolutely.

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.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

You're responsible for yourself as an actress, you know that your personal growth goes through that alchemy, and you give as much importance to your life as you do to your acting.

We have so many words for states of mind, and so few words for the states of the body.

Why should we stop living because some people try to kill what is left of energy in ourselves?

Acting for me was the gospel, the love of the spoken word.

You should not separate your life from what you do.

The cliche is that life is a mountain. You go up, reach the top and then go down.

Many people associate stage fright with a fear of looking ridiculous, making a bad impression. For me, it's like a kind of fever.

It's like climbing a staircase. I'm on the top of the staircase, I look behind me and I see the steps. That's where I was.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

It's this subconscious part of me that knows just how far to go, and suddenly, everything bursts into flames.