Citations

Movies are open doors, and at every door, I change character and life...I live for the present always. I accept this risk. I don't deny the past, but it's a page to turn.

When I returned to France after winning the Oscar, I was treated like royalty, or like a football hero!

Giving birth is like a vase of beautiful flowers. Only you're just the vase, and only for a very short moment. The flowers are beautiful, but they belong to themselves, not to the vase.

"I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women".

"I knew I had become a star when I shook hands with Simone Signoret at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. She died four months later".

Acting is like peeling an onion. You have to peel away each layer to reveal another.

I want to make films that are political and social. Films with a message or an idea. Films that dare to ask.

If a star is someone who gives light, then I can be a star. But if a star is someone who goes after money and magazine covers then it's sick and I don't want it!

French women bloom at 40! I can't wait!

My earliest memory is loneliness. That's a hard thing to live with

I have been proposed to four times. Twice at the beginning of a relationship and twice at the end of a relationship. I've never said no. I just didn't give an answer!

"Going to South Africa (La mémoire de mon pays (2004)) has changed me utterly. I have seen and heard about acts of cruelty and hatred which are hard to comprehend. But I've also seen peace and tranquility like nowhere else on earth".

My real excitement comes when a movie transforms me. When you love the movie you've played in, you can make that bridge back to your own life.

[on working with a secret agent for Quelques jours en septembre (2006)] Of course he could not reveal everything to me, but he said a lot. Some things I forgot because it was just too much. Certain things I was very amazed by and when I told people close to me about them they just wouldn't believe it. Everything in there is true.

The only way for me to stay young is to let go of youth. You cannot hang on to the past. You cannot try to be young when you're not young anymore. But the youth is within yourself. How do you renew yourself, how do you go to a new layer of yourself? That is the real youth. That is the renewance of yourself.

I believe in coincidences. Which is another way of saying that there are no coincidences. It's like life winks at you.

What seemed important when you are 20 - when you are 50 is hopefully not so important. Unless you haven't grown up.