Quotes

Didn't they warn you? I love to invent - avoiding the truth. I need to dramatize. It's also a form of protection.

I would now rather be very healthy and strong as a horse but it is nice to be attractive.

[from a 2005 Dutch newspaper interview] I don't expect too much from the afterlife, I think that I know very well what pain is. When I think of the end of my life, I think mainly: I didn't do nothing, but I could have done more.

Self confidence for me is a fragile fleece.

I was a silent actress, a body. I belonged to dreams, to those who can't be broken.

[on how the public perceived her] People don't assume that John Wayne shoots people and rides a horse on weekends. People think I'm a nymphomaniac.

I realized that the public had been deeply affected by Emmanuelle (1974) and wanted to prolong their fantasy, to keep me within it, symbolic and naked, idealized and necessary.

People say they miss the deceased. I missed my father and my mother when they were still fully alive. They traveled through my childhood in the same way they moved around the hotel: my mother industrious, hurried, hidden; my father drunk, flamboyant, alone.

I like this other world, this forgetting of myself. The actor works in order to escape, not to find himself. You become an actor by leaving yourself, and then you have to keep acting. How tragic!

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I - supposed fruit of their love - no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder than my parents' divorce.