Top 60 Charlotte Gainsbourg Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I hope one day I will be able to be completely myself. Maybe I’ll be wilder.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

2. “Everyone gets the feeling that they know you and they know your life, and I felt really embarrassed by that.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

3. “I didn’t want to change my personality onstage, but I still had to build some kind of ego to be able to go up there. If not, there’s no point.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

4. “Style for me is a casual way of putting something on. It’s not thought out but needs to suit your way of life. Now I like wearing the same sweater over and over again, then taking it off when it’s smelly.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

5. “You think that being a girl is degrading, but secretly, you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you?”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

6. “I love being a beginner. It can be a terrible feeling because you’re ashamed of everything you do, but it’s so exciting at the same time.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

7. “I’m a very shy person towards my intimacy and private life.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

8. “Girls can wear jeans, cut their hair short, wear shirts and boots, ’cause it’s okay to be a boy, but for a boy to look like a girl is degrading.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

9. “I don’t feel I have to share everything.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

10. “It’s more than a job. It’s very personal, so when you’re hurt, you’re really hurt inside.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

11. “I still find it hard to push my own limits. I know where my limits are and that I always have to push myself.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

12. “There’s always this thing of wanting to be elsewhere.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

13. “When you fight against your own weaknesses, there’s something embarrassing about it.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

14. “When you love someone, you don’t want them to suffer at all.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

15. “I don’t feel that I’ve accomplished anything. I feel that it’ll be better when I won’t care as much, but it’s so difficult to let go and accept all the wrong notes.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

16. “It’s difficult for me to write in English as it’s not my first language, but French is even worse because of my father’s influence and because the comparisons that I – not even other people – would make.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

17. “The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

18. “You don’t accept your weaknesses the same way that you love the weaknesses of another artist, because when they make mistakes they don’t look like weaknesses.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

19. “I was very well paid for my age, and I could make choices, decide not to do a film for six months and wait until I’d get the right thing. Which made me quite a coward.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

20. “I didn’t go to acting school, so it was great to be able to rehearse for a month or two, to workshop, and be with a director who even gave me acting exercises.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

21. “I like to play roles different from myself so I can hide behind them.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

22. “Each time I changed, it was as if, on purpose, I didn’t want anyone to know too much about me, which of course now I regret, because I closed myself to everything. But it was my way of dealing with things.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

23. “The problem with me in doing things simply is that I feel I’m not enough. It’s all very embarrassing.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

24. “My father loved me and he wanted to work with me and he didn’t care what people would say.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

25. “Wanting to do it was much more powerful than the fright.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

26. “There were always questions about my parents; I got so fed up with that.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

27. “I haven’t found a comfortable place onstage. I’m sure it doesn’t have to be comfortable, but I’m very nervous, so I don’t enjoy myself.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

28. “Letting go of things and not being afraid of being ridiculous or over the top – I think that’s the main thing for me to work on.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

29. “I thought people would ask me really personal questions because I’ve shown more of myself, but it’s a comedy, and people understand that it’s a game we play.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

30. “I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It’s not like having a conversation.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

31. “In France I’m very private, I don’t like talking about my life, and I imagined that people would think that I’m now an open book.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

32. “I felt that people would criticize everything. I was so scared about playing Paris. I was very much aware that the greatest concerts my father and mother had done were there. I was sure people would be very tough.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

33. “The character is close to me, except that I haven’t lived through those situations, so it’s not completely me.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

34. “It was very liberating to be able to sing in English. It had a different resonance, different images. It was like being a stranger in a foreign land, which was helpful.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

35. “I hope I’ll consider my next part, having learnt from this one.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

36. “I don’t want to feel that I’m a singer or an actress – being able to say that those are just experiences is what I enjoy.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

37. “The more sincere I could be, the better it would be for the film.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

38. “I used to hate being recognised.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

39. “Before I started touring, I worked with someone to help me, even physically, because I was so shy. And you can’t be shy going onstage. So I had to push myself in a direction that wasn’t myself.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

40. “I came to understand that people come and see you because they like you. They don’t come to throw things at you.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

41. “I wish I could just accept that I’m not that good and not be shy about the fact that I’m not that professional.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

42. “I’m desperate to work again. I’ve often had those periods, but two years was the longest.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

43. “I wasn’t getting the responses I hoped for. You can’t protect yourself from other judgments.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

44. “At the beginning it wasn’t to do with the work, it was more the experience.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

45. “I was really nervous about people booing, because my mother had gone for a film 20 years earlier and had a terrible time with people booing, whistling, so I knew that in Cannes people can get aggressive.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

46. “I’d love to be able to write again, but I’m so repetitive. And it was all about fear. Never positive. Just indulgent about my sadness.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

47. “Even moving around onstage seemed very artificial. But at the same time you have to make that effort in order to get back to who you are and even accept not moving, if that’s who you are.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

48. “I think I developed a very closed personality. I didn’t really have friends. I changed schools every year.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

49. “I don’t have tons of scripts where I don’t know what to choose and I’m trying to calculate. It’s either I read something and I have an impulse to do it, or in meeting someone, I want to work with them, but it’s always been very obvious.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg

50. “I hated seeing myself on screen. I was full of complexes. I hated my face for a very, very long time.”

— Charlotte Gainsbourg