Jeanne Moreau Quotes
"While I'm doing the role, I'm the part. I'm the person. But once I'm finished I'm me."
"I've worked hard. I'm passionate and my world is cinema, acting, theater, creativity, art, painting, books, music, sculpture, landscapes, movements of people in the streets. Everything."
"Acting deals with very delicate emotions. It is not putting up a mask. Each time an actor acts he does not hide; he exposes himself."
"Don't take care of yourself because you want to stop time. Do it for self-respect. It's an incredible gift, the energy of life. 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". "The life you had is nothing. It is the life you have that is important". "Some people are addicts. If they don't act, they don't exist".
"At the beginning of my career, I was seeking something traditional, strict; just to prove to my father that being an actress is not being a whore".
"I am a woman with absolutely no sense of nostalgia"
"While you work, while you create, you have doubts, and this is essential."
"I am open to what is irrational. I open doors to intuition, because rationality is really death."
"Making films is no longer a way of acting, it is a way of life."
"We have so many words for states of the mind, and so few for states of the body."
"Movies influence people once you get successful, and people give importance through you to the characters you do. I refused parts showing aging women getting drunk and suicidal. I know it exists, but I refuse to give that image of women; it's not my task to show the worst side of what can happen to them. I want to be an upper, not a downer".
"The public sees me too much as they see me in films where I'm always playing unorthodox characters."
"I decided my glass would always be half full, never half empty."
"The love, suffering, and happiness I experience in life appear in my movies, become an integral part of them. When I see a film after I've made it, I see my own life before me."
"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."
"Everything I have I have wanted."
"I've never worried about age. If you're extremely, painfully frightened of age, it shows. Life doesn't end at 30. To me age is a number, just a number. Who cares?"
"Age does not protect you from love, but love, to some extent, protects you from age."
"I'm intelligent, but I'm not intellectual."
"Every night, I go over what I did in the day, in ethical or moral terms."
"Making a film is like life aboard ship, except that every day is an emergency."
"I'm a passionate woman who falls in love very easily."
"I've always been ambitious, but not competitive."
"I never use the word 'career', it's a journalistic term. I can't separate creation from life."
"To act is to move. It is that power to move that gives me real happiness."
"If you don't give a damn, men look at you."
"Acting is transmitting life."
"I'm not measured. I'm not lukewarm. It's not always easy to live with for me."
"One's soul is like a vast unexplored country."
"Like every human being I have everything in me - the best and the worst."
"Life is just a lot of interesting landscapes and one makes one's own geography."
"When you live in terror and segregation you can't create art."
"Passion is jealous. Passion goes up and down. Love is consistent. Fidelity, that's what love is about. Compassion, you give even more than you receive. That's what love is about. I'd hate to still be a victim of passion - I would think, God! I've lived all these years and I've learned nothing?"
"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."
"You have to know cold to appreciate warmth."
"Love is like the soup, the first spoonfuls are too hot, the last ones too cold."
"I never come out of a film the same as I went in. Each time I discover new capacities for feelings and emotions I never knew I had."
"I was never interested in existentialism, because of Sartre's famous phrase 'Hell is the others'. For me, this is a crazy idea. For me, hell is one's self."
[speaking in 1965] "People who wanted to be nice about my looks always would say - "You remind me so much of
Bette Davis". Very nice, except I can't stand
Bette Davis."
"They will write 'Amant de Jules et Jim' on my gravestone when I go."
"In making dinner for a friend, don't forget the love."
"Life is an accomplishment. Each moment has a meaning and you must use it. 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."
"Age does not automatically bring wisdom. It might bring you knowledge, but wisdom is not a cold cream that you rub in each night and then wake up smarter in the morning."
"Although for some people cinema means something superficial and glamorous, it is something else. I think it is the mirror of the world."
"One should never say 'When I was young...'"
"Each time I come to New York, it's like meeting again someone I love."
"Sometimes the directors were afraid of what they brought out of me. Even if they changed later when they were aging, at the time we first met - and I was usually five or six years older than they were - they wanted to know about women. I was grateful, because I wanted to know about women, too."
"If I get concerned with what kind of part I would like to play, I would then start to wonder what roles would be good for me, good for my career, pleasing for the public. Life does not invite this choice and neither should films."
"
Lee Marvin is more male than anyone I have ever acted with. He is the greatest man's man I have ever met and that includes all the European stars I have worked with."
"Whenever I have doubts about the reactions of a character, I find her a place in mythology."
"When I've finished with my movie career, I may not own any snack bars, but at least I will have made the movies I wanted to make."
"I always have the impression that I am in the midst of becoming. Even if it's my death that's becoming. It's in process. It's not over."
"I do not think that for human beings the physical beauty is totally separated from inner beauty. Your mood shows on your face. That is something that comes from the inside. If you're in a good mood there is something different about your complexion, the light in your eyes, your mouth doesn't droop. There is energy coming out of you."
