“Nothingness not being nothing, nothingness being emptiness.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“There has already been the karmic work: that what life has transformed in me, this initiation brought on, of necessity, by trials.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“But no one frees himself from being in love in three days.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I have no fear of being less beautiful, I’ve always been afraid of not being beautiful.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“In love, one should simplify, choose persons worthy of their promises and leave them if they don’t keep them.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“You protect your being when you love yourself better. That’s the secret.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“My limits will be better marked. Both the limits I will set, and my own limits.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“To leave in search of yourself, of your real needs, is easier when you don’t have to justify yourself to anyone, when there are not too many people bestowing you their attention.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I loved my freedom as an adolescent, and I’d love to be an adolescent again.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I believe in angels, so it’s simple.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“To change, that is the most difficult thing to accomplish.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I believe that when you work on yourself, you are attracted by different, more positive beings.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“One can not love without opening oneself, and opening oneself, that’s taking the risk of suffering. One does not have control.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I think we have to get back the value of behavior that is consistent with being taught: that’s to say, respecting teachers, listening, and not always expecting your opinion to take precedence.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“People tell me I’m doing all these intense women and that I should lighten up. Then I do a comedy that I’m not happy with, and I think, ‘Let’s go back to heavy, heart-breaking drama; it’s so much more fun.’”
― Isabelle Adjani
“It doesn’t need to be that violent and crazy and wild. Having experienced it, you don’t belong to yourself anymore. You belong to the passion… It’s something you have to go through to learn what passion is about.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“If you are in a gym class with other women, and even if you are in shape, you feel like, ‘Do they think my legs are not right?’ Since you are supposed to be the perfect one, they look for the defects. It’s such an embarrassment.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I’m a very secretive person. That’s how I grew up. My father was very secretive.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I take risks, but I don’t lose respect for my real self. Because what’s going to happen afterwards? How are you going to get back? Is there going to be a train, or will it be after midnight and you can’t go home again?”
― Isabelle Adjani
“The soul preserves beauty.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Life has brought me work to do on myself these past two years.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I think that we all carry the divine within us.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“There are people who never experience that, who remain closed until death, from fear of change.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“If I had not passed through trial – through passion, one could say – through these years so painful and so rich, I don’t believe I could take on my life and my career as I do today.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Before, for me, peace could have been synonymous with boredom.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“One believes that if nothing happens, one disappears. That is not true.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“One can be emptied out and be filled up.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“One is never ready for success. It consecrates and looses you at the same time.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I do not want to work to correspond to an image.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Passion is all but soft, it’s not tender, it’s violence to which you get hooked by pleasure.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Passion surprises. One doesn’t search it. It can happen to you tomorrow.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I don’t think of it at the moment, but the roles that interest me are those of young people.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“There has also been much love, joy, evidence of admiration, there has never been one without the other.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I’m in an agreeable state: busy, enthusiastic, curious.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I’ve suffered too much to hide my feelings.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I’ve learned that to expose yourself, to reveal yourself is a test of your humanness.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“You must take the risk to disclose yourself in order to become more real, more human. And even if the price is high.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Today I trust my instinct, I trust myself. Finally.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“The newspapers were saying, ‘You have AIDS.’ They actually said I was dead. I just threw myself into my work when the whispering campaign turned really ugly.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I talked about the persecution of Algerians and told about racism in my childhood. And it was as if, after that, I wasn’t French anymore.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I went on French television for 20 minutes. It was very embarrassing to have to say, ‘I’m not dead. I’m well. I’m not ill, and I don’t have AIDS.’ I hated doing it, because it was so insulting to those who really did have AIDS.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I am a follower of hyaluronic acid – always in small doses, of course – to fill wrinkles and fine lines.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I’ve never felt like a French actress.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“If I don’t work very often, it’s because what I read is written for formidable actresses, but actresses who make a habit of playing with their cup half full.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I like films that rest in the memory, so I try and choose parts which have some kind of social or emotional force.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“For me, being an actress is not just a profession but a profession of faith.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“It’s funny how people fantasise about your life sometimes. But it’s so much quieter than they think.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Passion is very destructive.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I like to go see films that give me courage and hope.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Simply, the majority of the most interesting filmmakers are the ones confronted with difficult situations. Their creativity blows a hole in the wall and lets in the light.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“American hypocrisy consists of thinking that everything is serious; French hypocrisy is to think that nothing is serious.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I’m a public figure. It’s up to me to take the initiative to explain things. It’s my responsibility.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“We can’t forbid women from going to the beach because of a costume, even if it is rightly seen as neo-fundamentalist, backward, and shocking.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I find the heated political debate over the burkini both ridiculous and dangerous.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Journalists are still inventing things that never existed about me. Before, it made me cry, but now I laugh about it.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“If my life hadn’t itself been a modern adaptation of ‘Les Atrides,’ I probably would never have left the theatre.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Someone who is an artist can say, ‘I can create and can make what I create disappear.’”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I have a lot of friends in Paris, and I love to get away from home.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“Algeria keeps me awake at night. What about you?”
― Isabelle Adjani
“When you hold a baby in your arms, you don’t want to put it in a basket right away. You want to keep the baby close.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I like working emotions that can take you beyond your life. And yet you have to resist them in order remain within your life. Otherwise, you’re burned. I like that fight. It’s more of a fight with yourself.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“For me to get up and feel the urge to go to the set and all that, I have to feel there is something tremendously vibrating to achieve there. I need to lose sometimes a consciousness of the person and the reality in order to be happy to come back into the reality and happier to live it for this cause, to be an artist in this life.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“It’s exhilarating to read something that tells you that people saw something and felt something that you thought was so discreet. When they relate you to some of their own fantasies of who or how some actresses should be in movies. That’s really kind of sweet!”
― Isabelle Adjani
“You have to believe yourself to be the centre of the world, or you believe nothing. You start to treat yourself very badly.”
― Isabelle Adjani
“I took the test for AIDS. I began to hate people who were not sick. Those people are monsters, I would think, believing that they are well because of moral superiority, because they are good. I identified with the loneliness of the sick. I felt that there was something pure about them.”
― Isabelle Adjani
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