I think people should be different. I love people who don't go by the rule that you have to be careful because you're old, you have to do this and that, you have to eat this and that.

If I was tall and blonde, I might have been a dancer or singer.

I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo - and I kept it all my life!

To share a lot of ideas - not ideas - emotions, a way of looking at people, a way of looking at life. If it can be shared, it means there is a common denominator.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done - people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway - in France we have Nathalie Sarraute - and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

The story of a couple is always very fragile, especially over more than thirty years. People know it's not easy, and even though you have strong feeling and desire and endless love, it doesn't always happen.