Quotes from Jeanne Moreau

If you get trapped in the idea that what is most important is what image of yourself you're giving to the world, you're on a dangerous path.

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

I don't like going where I've already been. Life is a myriad of territories to discover. I don't want to waste time with what I already know.

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.

Age doesn't protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Something pretty... that's just the surface. People worry so much about aging, but you look younger if you don't worry about it.

To go out with the setting sun on an empty beach is to truly embrace your solitude.

I can't belong to groups. I've tried. I behave normally, but people don't look at me normally.

Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same. I know so many people staying in the same place.

I'm always amazed when young women who are having babies want their husbands to watch the babies come out. I would never allow anything like that.

Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I am finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden, so there is a lot of work.

I don't think success is harmful, as so many people say. Rather I believe it indispensible to talent: if for nothing else than to increase the talent.

Success is like a liberation, or the first phase of a love affair.

Being an actress is to be in tune with the fantasies of a man. What woman never dreamt of that?

Women will not talk about football unless one of them is in love with a football player, and then suddenly you discover that they know everything that is to be known about it.

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

I have no doubt who I am.

I am a woman with absolutely no sense of nostalgia.

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

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

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.

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

It's dangerous to assert oneself.

I've never worried about age.