Paris blasts from the past

"Well, like Humphrey Bogart says, we'll always have Paris."

JEAN-LUC GODARD, Interview, July 1994

"I wake up and immediately begin my toilette. If I thought about work, the anxiety would begin. It shouldn't be thought about at all. Then one could stay in bed for days thinking, never working. I just go. It's very difficult and I have tried to take my work, at times, less heavy. That's impossible. I give myself too much to do, too much responsibility. After my metier, there's not much left for my personal life. But I accept my responsibility with dignity. It's a duty to others as well as to myself. There are so many people who depend on me."

YVES SAINT LAURENT, Interview, October 1980

"As long as you don't make waves, ripples, life seems easy. But that's condemning yourself to impotence and death before you are dead. But if you want to live, and live your life through to the end, you have to live dangerously. And one thing you have to give up is attaching importance to what people see in you."

JEANNE MOREAU, Interview, September 1996

"My evolution began in those days in the late '60s and early '70s. The whole world changed and so did we. I loved the change when customs, styles of dress, habits were being questioned and turned upside down."

YVES SAINT LAURENT, Interview, October 1980

"One day I just left and came to Paris with nothing other than the clothes I was wearing. I wanted nothing more than to work in the fashion world. I knew no one, and I simply went around ringing door bells."

THIERRY MUGLER, Interview, February 1979

"[Star quality] is something else. Something that just happens on screen. Charisma, perhaps, I mean. I know too many talented people who don't make it--you know, really make it on screen as movie stars--so I know that it's not the talent that the people like. It's something else. I don't mean it's something more, but it's something else. For a woman, especially, it has to do with a certain relationship with the camera and the lights and the way they reflect on your skin. Some beautiful faces also get completely distorted when they start speaking. It's true and it's very unfair."

CATHERINE DENEUVE, Interview, March 1987

"I'm not aiming to develop an American-style society in France. I'm trying to apply the best lessons of a very highly developed knowledge in certain high-tech sectors: of availability; of swiftness in execution; of mobility in thought and action that set the pace in this country and confer on it a rapidity we could rightly envy. No, we have to see our country as it really is; it has its virtues, it has advantages. In any case, you can see in our country, in many, many towns and cities, not just in Paris, an extremely strong upsurge of intelligence, of energies--among those who are conceiving and others who are doing, and often they are the same. We have to shorten the routes and go directly from basic research to applied research to industrial research and then to business itself."

PRESIDENT FRANCOIS MITTERRAND, Interview, August 1984

"I arrived in Paris at the end of the '50s. I came from Tunisia but I didn't feel that I was in a different country. I had been raised by my grandmother without religion. And I felt really at home in France for that reason. Anyway, I would have felt at home because I can adapt myself anywhere. I had come because a woman from Dior invited me to come to Paris."

AZZEDINE ALAIA, Interview, October 1990

"[Francois] Truffaut likes very straight faces on the screen. He's got a kind of trademark, otherwise he wouldn't be Truffaut. He loves to look at actors and particularly actresses in a very voyeuristic way. He loves to let them do something before he says anything. I think he thinks that to be an actress is a very scabrous thing. I think he loves a kind of nobleness of prostitution in actresses. That's why I say he's a voyeur, but it's not pejorative, at all. It's his way of being, as a director and as a man in front of actors and actresses. It's a kind of eroticism, in a way, but every director has his own way of being erotic on the set. But that makes you free to do something and suggest something else at the same time."

ISABELLE ADJANI, Interview, March 1976

"[After a show] is a feeling of emptiness. That usually comes when I'm in bed and not able to sleep. After the collection, it doesn't belong to me. After all, I have given my creativity, my dreams. It's an ephemeral emptiness, a very profound feeling which is not exactly disagreeable, just a bit depressing at times. If one writes, composes music, or paints, it is permanent. Finally, nothing remains. I agree if you say the clothes are there, they are worn. But what happens during the presentation is only a day at the end of enormous work."

YVES SAINT LAURENT, Interview, October 1980

"I don't think I look like a couturier. Look at me, balding, sauvage, I have a peasant's face. I think I could have been a much better farmer as I love the earth and would love to have a big farm and raise animals, cows and rows of plantations. I also love architecture but it is very difficult to be free to do architecture in France. So I do couture. It is easy and fun, I can let my ideas soar, do anything I want and it works."