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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I work more now because at this time of my life I am not disturbed from my aim by outside pressures such as family, passionate relationships, dealing with 'who am I?' - those complications when one is searching for one's self.

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.

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.

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.

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 should not separate your life from what you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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