Quotes from Isabelle Adjani

I'm a very secretive person. That's how I grew up. My father was very secretive.

I have a lot of friends in Paris, and I love to get away from home.

When you hold a baby in your arms, you don't want to put it in a basket right away. You want to keep the baby close.

Life has brought me work to do on myself these past two years.

I like working emotions that can take you beyond your life. And yet you have to resist them in order remain within your life. Otherwise, you're burned. I like that fight. It's more of a fight with yourself.

I've suffered too much to hide my feelings.

You have to believe yourself to be the centre of the world, or you believe nothing. You start to treat yourself very badly.

Before, for me, peace could have been synonymous with boredom.

I like to go see films that give me courage and hope.

I find the heated political debate over the burkini both ridiculous and dangerous.

I'm in an agreeable state: busy, enthusiastic, curious.

I talked about the persecution of Algerians and told about racism in my childhood. And it was as if, after that, I wasn't French anymore.

I took the test for AIDS. I began to hate people who were not sick. Those people are monsters, I would think, believing that they are well because of moral superiority, because they are good. I identified with the loneliness of the sick. I felt that there was something pure about them.

The soul preserves beauty.

Passion is very destructive.

The newspapers were saying, 'You have AIDS.' They actually said I was dead. I just threw myself into my work when the whispering campaign turned really ugly.

You must take the risk to disclose yourself in order to become more real, more human. And even if the price is high.

For me, being an actress is not just a profession but a profession of faith.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

One believes that if nothing happens, one disappears. That is not true.

I think that we all carry the divine within us.

I went on French television for 20 minutes. It was very embarrassing to have to say, 'I'm not dead. I'm well. I'm not ill, and I don't have AIDS.' I hated doing it, because it was so insulting to those who really did have AIDS.

It's exhilarating to read something that tells you that people saw something and felt something that you thought was so discreet. When they relate you to some of their own fantasies of who or how some actresses should be in movies. That's really kind of sweet!

One can be emptied out and be filled up.