Quotes from Charlotte Rampling

I think the reason I have secrets is because there are a lot of things I haven't been able to let out, and I'm able to let them out through the screen and this medium.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

My style very much leans towards the masculine, but I think I am feminine in it - I like the feminine body in masculine shapes. The androgynous look suits me.

I'm very flattered to be called a style icon! But it's simple, my style; it's just men's suits and shoes. That's the basic premise.

I could have carried on in comedy. But my life was dark.

Doing cinema is not about watching yourself.

I think that most actors don't have very good opinions of themselves

Painting and photography keep the creative channel open, and for an actor, it's to keep alive, it's to keep awake, it's to keep watching, it's to keep feeling, it's to keep enjoying, to keep that sensuality of feeling alive.

You decide to give your trust over to somebody. And if you don't decide to, then for me, it's really not worth going into collective enterprises; you should just work alone.

Usually, watching yourself is pretty awful. People think we all love watching our own films. We don't. We cringe away from it.

I could have been a superstar in America - I was certainly taken out there. But I said, 'No way, Jose, I'm not staying here in this madhouse.'

I remember my father saying to me once, 'I finally know how to describe you, Charlotte. You're prickly.' And he was right - prickly is a very good description. If I had to be an animal, I'd probably be a porcupine.

I haven't got ambitions. Actually, I'm determined not to die until I get very old. I want to be a great-great-great-grandmother.

Quite often in life, when a tragic event arrives it becomes a springboard for mirroring all other things in one's life that one hasn't come to terms with.

I must explore desert ground and see what can grow. But there are limits. I know in my heart what I would never do.

There are moments when things just break apart and not really for very valid reasons, either. But they just change your life and make you go in different directions.

It's sort of fun. If someone's eyeballing you, it makes you feel good.

My mother's incredible diaries, which she'd written from when she was 21, and even before that. She fell in love with my father when she was 12.

I don't want to play everything. So I'll seek out roles that I'll say, 'This is edgy. This is fun. This is wicked. This suits me.'

I've played the wicked mothers; I've played the serial-killer-type mothers now. They have to have an edge on them. They can't just be everyday moms, because I never thought of myself as an everyday person in cinema - I'm an everyday person in real life, like anyone. But not in what I project out there. I want something more exciting.

I know I have great inner strength; I always have. I can blank things out, cut people out, and I know that I can go and live in a cave on my own if necessary.

When a subject pops into a director's head, you either fit in there somewhere, or you don't. An actor is only who he is. Especially as you get older, there's not as much of a range of potentially feasible parts.

To grieve is something extremely difficult, we don't even know how to begin to grieve, and I don't know how you can be taught to grieve.

I think the happiest time of my life was when I was in my late teens. I was a little bit of an it-girl. Making myself seen. And it was a wonderful time to be young.