Quotes from Jeanne Moreau

To give a character life in a short space of time, it helps if you arrive on screen with a past.

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

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

Aging gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. Don't worry girls, look like a wreck, that's the way it goes.

Life has to flow. But if you start worrying about it, you block time.

Life is an accomplishment and each moment has a meaning and you must use it.

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

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.

Making films is no longer a way of acting, it is a way of life.

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

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.

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

My life is very exciting now. Nostalgia for what? It's like climbing a staircase. I'm on the top of the staircase, I look behind and see the steps. That's where I was. We're here right now. Tomorrow, we'll be someplace else. So why nostalgia?

It's like climbing a staircase. I'm on the top of the staircase, I look behind me and I see the steps. That's where I was.

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

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

People's opinions don't interfere with me. Ageing gracefully is supposed to mean trying not to hide time passing and just looking a wreck. That's what they call ageing gracefully. You know?

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

Every night I go over what I did in the day, in ethical or moral terms. Have I treated people properly? Did I tell the truth?

nothing is more like truth than a lie, don't you find?

Age protects love not, but love protects up to a certain degree before age.

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.

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

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