Liv Ullmann Quotes

One of the things I like about my profession, and that I find healthy, is that one constantly has to break oneself to pieces.

Nobody is one block of harmony. We are all afraid of something, or feel limited in something. We all need somebody to talk to. It would be good if we talked to each other, not just pitter patter but real talk. We shouldn't be afraid, because most people really like this contact; that you show you are vulnerable makes them free to be vulnerable too. It's so much easier to be together when we drop our masks.

I think of all the choices I never knew. And those I let be made for me - to please, from fear, for love. Where did they disappear to, those choices that I never made? They are all part of who I am. They are the legacy I leave behind, they are the finished portrait of myself I cannot change.

It's better to wake up alone knowing that you're alone, than waking up with someone and still be lonely

If only we could accept that there is no difference between us where human values are concerned. Whatever sex.

Sometimes I get a little tired of it. But you know, what a privilege, to get tired of working with Ingmar Bergman.

I am learning that if I just go on accepting the framework for life that others have given me, if I fail to make my own choices, the reason for my life will be missing. I will be unable to recognize that which I have the power to change.

Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences.

Oh, those wonder-filled evenings when acting enables me for a short moment to have more life.

I do not want to arrive at the end of life and then be asked what I made of it and have to answer: 'I acted.' I want to be able to say: 'I loved and I was mystified. It was a joy sometimes, and I knew grief. And I would like to do it all again.'

Books have always been living things to me. Some of my encounters with new authors have changed my life a little. When I have been perplexed, looking for something I could not define to myself, a certain book has turned up, approached me as a friend would. And between it's cover carried the questions and the answers I was looking for.

reality can be magnificent even when life is not.

Nothing ever comes to an end. Wherever one has sunk roots that emanate from one's best or truest self, one will always find a home.

The best thing that can come with success is the knowledge that it is nothing to long for.

The fear inside of loneliness: That only what others have is real.

What I have always loved most in men is imperfection. I get moved by the wrinkles on the throat of a man. It makes me love him more. I think it is sad that more women don't take the chance that maybe men will be moved by seeing the chin a little less firm than it used to be, that a man will be more in love with his wife because he remembers who she was and sees who she is and thinks, God, isn't that lovely that this happened to her. And be moved by life telling its story there.

Choice is the essence of what I believe it is to be human.

We are different. We are equal in every way but our voices are important to each other and our need to want to listen to each other and try to understand, because sometimes we are so difficult to understand. Men to understand us, and we to understand men. And we don't. We don't connect the way we should.

I believe we come to earth with sealed orders. I believe that only those who lack passion look down on purpose.

It is only the untalented director who imagines him or herself in every part, wants his or her own thoughts and emotions portrayed; it is only the untalented who make their own limitations those of the actors as well.

it is only in statistics that people die by the millions. Each person dies individually, in his own predicament.

I just think that sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than to wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone else. Some people would be better off alone, but they feel they've got to get hold of someone to prove they're worthwhile.

It is tough to be a woman. Also as an actor, but more so as a director. And even more today, when distributors and producers are looking at different kinds of films and maybe not necessarily what a woman would want to do.

I looked into the mirror and saw this middle-aged woman who keeps invading my face.

We who are alive at this moment are only an infinitesimal part of something that has existed for eternity and will continue when there is no longer anything to show that earth existed. Still, we must feel and believe that we are all.

Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.

Soon I will be an old, white-haired lady, into whose lap someone places a baby, saying, "Smile, Grandma!" - I, who myself so recently was photographed on my grandmother's lap.

Ibsen was Norwegian by birth, but universal in spirit.

What I have always loved most in men is imperfection.

I realize that we've come to a different way of showing movies. But I'm still with the old ways, and I can't change.

I consider myself a realist who wants to stand up for women's voices, not when they try to be the same, but when they stand up for who we are and what we see and how important it is that our voice is heard.

There is a difference between film and digital. Because digital, you know, it's perfect and whatever. But with film, you get depth. You get subject.

I had the advantage, that I know Swedish. So I had the Swedish book and I had a lot of English translations, and German translations, and I did everything to make the best English translation of August Strindberg's Miss Julie I could. And then, there I went. "Oh! I think she's thinking this, but I think she should say it!" And so on. It's wonderful to do that.

Since suffering confers no rights on its victims, we who witness are the ones responsible for restoring these lost rights.

I have the experience of age and suffering.

I can't expect people to decide that they will change with me, so I can see why I'm on the old side.

Yeah, unfortunately [ films like Miss Julie are a dying breed]. And that is sad, because we need these. Like we need books, we need classical music, we need ballet, we need opera, to remind us really of who we are and why we are, and we need in movie houses - even to be in a movie - where you sit and see not only excitement and man-hero, woman-hero, you need quietly, just like that Hawking movie we talked about, to know how people overcome.

Film is wonderful as opposed to theater, because it will always live there, and they will always be seen.

We are equal human beings, and we were born with evil and anger and misunderstanding of what a man is, and so we are as needy and wanting to be part of him, as he, obviously, was needing and wanting to be part of us. And that's why I've really taken the freedom, because it's an adaptation, to give her a voice.

Colin [Farrell] I talked to several times on the phone, and I said, remember, we have only twenty-five days of doing the movie [Miss Julie], so you must know some of your text. I was a little un-feminist, I didn't want to say [bossy voice] "learn your text!" But when he came, he knew all his text.

August Strindberg gave me the opportunity to have this incredible story [Miss Julie ], about the class system, about unfairness in life, but also this story about man and woman. What I wanted, because he gave me the freedom, to give her a voice that I missed a little in her.

We need feminist voices today, you know. In my time, we had incredible feminist voices and I'm sure we have it today, too, but in all the massive outlets, maybe the one or two or three voices are somehow disappearing.

You see that a lot in movies, and today you see it more in movies that are made, because I feel more movies are made towards groups than towards individuals, and they're made more for mass media than for sitting in a movie house allowing it to happen.

The age, you know. A man can be wiser and wiser, and a woman is older and older.

I'm maybe not so much an exception, maybe because I've lived so long that more is coming, more is there.

The void Papa's death left in me became a kind of cavity, into which later experiences were to be laid.

The Summer Book is beautiful and warm, with the kind of wisdom we can adapt to our everyday lives.

If a person is found dead here, a postmorten will always reveal whether he has spent less than three weeks in the city. That is the length of time it takes this pollution to invade the body, after which it is there forever.

I believe that it is sometimes less difficult to wake up and feel that I am alone when I really am, than to wake up with someone else and be lonely.