Jeanne Moreau Quotes

I can be intimidating, but not within the confines of a film shoot.

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

My face has changed with the years and has enough history in it to give audiences something to work with.

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

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

Success is like a liberation or the first phrase of a love story.

Death is an absolute mystery. We are all vulnerable to it, it's what makes life interesting and suspenseful.

In these days people take up with each other and drop each other too easily. Pleasure is practiced like a sport, and the easy game of love leads to the dissolution of the feeling of love.

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.

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.

I know there were things emanating from me. I was not aware of what attracted all these directors to me.

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

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

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

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

I don't like the idea of separating life and work. That notion seems dated and a bit alien to 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.

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

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

Liberation didn't solve anything. It just opened up the doors to greed. Some people mix up sex now as if they were eating or drinking like crazy.

All those vitamins aren't to keep death at bay, they're to keep deterioration at bay.

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.

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.

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

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.

I've never worried about age.

It's dangerous to assert oneself.

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

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

I've been related to everything. Even the production; I knew how much it cost, I knew where the money went. It didn't last long, because hierarchy came back again.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It's just as idiotic to say there is no life after death as it is to say there is one.

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.

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.

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

You should not separate your life from what you do.

I could live without acting.... Acting is a gift I've received. And I'm grateful for it and I enjoy it. But it's not the main point of my life. It never was.

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

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

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

As soon as an actress is past 40, they call her a grande dame. As long as I'm here in good health, I'm stable.

When Tony was madly in love with me, his relationship with Vanessa Redgrave was ending.

You suffer when you give birth, it doesn't matter, it's nature. They tell you, oh, those hormone pills, they're terrible, you'll get cancer. But when it comes to Viagra for men, they don't speak about cancer.