“When you're young, all the accidents, all the pain you take them, but at least you're very strong. In fact through time, it's just adding more and more pain, more and more loss and it makes you more fragile.”
“I didn't learn a lot from books. I learned a lot from movies.”
“I'm attached to my land in Pantelleria as if I'd inherited it. Acting is my job, Pantelleria is my home.”
“I've been working since I was 18. People say something every time I cut my hair. They wouldn't say this to Dustin Hoffman.”
“What bothers you isn't so much whether you're beautiful or not. What bothers you is the way that people stare.”
“I did get offers from Hollywood, but they were all scripts with monsters in them. If I had done them, I would have disappeared. I would have come back to France anyway, and I would have had to start all over again and lost a lot of time.”
“I was lucky enough to be able to do comedies, dramas, completely different parts. At the beginning, when you start you have a fantasy that you could be somebody else. Which is absurd. That's part of being an actor. It's your voice, it's the way you move, it's your body, even if you transform it, you play with it.”
“Of course when I started, it's not because I was such a brilliant actress. I didn't know I was good. I thought I was really bad. I was very shy. I was 18 and dreaming of becoming an actress.”
“People have to identify with their own stories, with their own lives, so a movie belongs to a country and to a culture. Sometimes we can share, but it's very rare.”
“The problem with movies is that you see from the first day - you're on a train, and if the movie is not going in the right direction you know it right away. Sometimes, you can't get off the train, and the whole experience is painful.”