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

What is amazing for a woman of my age is that I change as the world is changing-and changing very, very fast. I don't think my mother had that opportunity to change.

When I'm acting, I'm two beings. There's the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.

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

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of form a distance; it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast - or else there is nothing at all.

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

An individual chooses and makes himself.

I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity.

One cannot become a saint when one works sixteen hours a day.

One could only damage oneself through the harm one did to others. One could never get directly at oneself.

I do not think therefore I am a moustache

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

Neither sex, without some fertilization of the complimentary characters of the other, is capable of the highest reaches of human endeavor.

Every age has its own poetry; in every age the circumstances of history choose a nation, a race, a class to take up the torch by creating situations that can be expressed or transcended only through poetry.

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become. One lives one's death, one dies one's life.

Fear? If I have gained anything by damning myself, it is that I no longer have anything to fear.

Who can exhaust a man? Who knows a man's resources?

Acting is happy agony.

He is always becoming, and if it were not for the contingency of death, he would never end.

I confused things with their names: that is belief.

I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest. So gather me up, dear, fold me to your heart – and you’ll see how nice I can be.

My thought is me: that is why I cannot stop thinking. I exist because I think I cannot keep from thinking.