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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Lou Doillon Quotes

In England, you laugh at yourselves; in France, we laugh at others.

– Lou Doillon

I’m in my father’s car at age 9 or 10 crying to Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat,’ thinking that you could write nearly a love letter to a man who betrayed you by having an affair with your wife. I was thinking how wonderful and pure music can be for explaining situations.

– Lou Doillon

There is an image of me in France that is a long stretch from who I really am. I read about this girl who lives in grand hotels and has affairs with American actors – I don’t recognise this girl at all. Sometimes it makes me depressed. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Sometimes I think, ‘Gosh, that sounds nice, I’d love to be that girl.’

– Lou Doillon

The English and Japanese are the most inventive dressers in the world, but French girls are the most beautiful. I am still always amazed by the style of French girls, and the only reason is that they dress according to themselves and not according to fashion. They know what suits them.

– Lou Doillon

The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.

– Lou Doillon

I’ve always found that fashion is, first of all, mainly for yourself. So my two icons are, on one side, Little Edie from ‘Grey Gardens’ and, of course, like all my generation, I’m influenced by Kate Moss.

– Lou Doillon

In a modern world where a majority of women say, ‘I don’t need you, I’ve got my money, I’ve got my stuff,’ I say, ‘I desperately need men.’ My whole album is a tribute to men. It takes a man in me to tell you that I’m on my knees for men.

– Lou Doillon

I like costumes. I am always dressing up – I’m very English like that.

– Lou Doillon

I always lived with guitarists. When they would leave, I would just pick up their acoustic guitars and start doing finger picking and write.

– Lou Doillon

I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess – I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.

– Lou Doillon

I hate short hair on men – the ‘real’ man is something I don’t know. My dad was always playing with hairbands, making rings, while the women were wearing jeans, white T-shirts and Converse. That was the uniform at home.

– Lou Doillon

My mother taught me to wash my hair as little as possible, and to rinse it with Coke before a shoot for a sexy, tousled look.

– Lou Doillon

The silhouette is the most important thing in clothes. Every French girl knows that. High-waisted trousers give you long legs and a pretty bum which, after all, is what we all want.

– Lou Doillon

I was such a tomboy. I had absolutely no bosom, and I wore my hair really short – shaved, like a boy.

– Lou Doillon

My mother always spoke to me in English, so it’s technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language – I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn’t understand it.

– Lou Doillon

The more you’re writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention – even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it’s at your own scale – other people relate to it much more.

– Lou Doillon

My mother is old-fashioned; she raised us like girls from a 19th-century book. My sisters and I are known for being the most polite girls in France. My mother wanted us to be like royalty: never ever will you be caught being rude, or superficial or being a star or whatever.

– Lou Doillon

I have a huge scarf from Hermes that I bought the day I signed my record deal. I had never had an Hermes scarf. And I ran to buy one, thinking, ‘Now, this is a symbol, I need one, I need an Hermes scarf,’ which actually now I’m quite embarrassed about. Most of the time I twist it so much that no one notices it, and just bundle it around me.

– Lou Doillon

Luckily, I was raised by a kind of gypsy family, which is why I always get along better with people who worked in circuses than with kids of other actors. My mom was so carefree with us in a beautiful way. We were used to sleeping anywhere.

– Lou Doillon

I always have lipstick, and use the same lipstick for my cheeks as blush, so that it looks very natural. It’s a good trick I learned from my mother. I like NYX or MAC because they have a lot of pigment and they’re matte.

– Lou Doillon

I was raised by muses. Women who had men in awe of them and who wrote them movies and wrote them music.

– Lou Doillon

With fashion, my mother was an icon, but she never lived it in the sense that she was never obsessed with fashion. When I was a young girl, my sister wasn’t doing fashion, so I started fashion thinking, ‘I’m going to do something that they haven’t done yet.’ That was my silly scheme at the time.

– Lou Doillon

‘Blanche’ opened a new door for me without really making me more famous. ‘Blanche’ was a risk, but that is the only thing that excites me in this profession. The knowledge that I am an actress who takes risks lifts my soul.

– Lou Doillon

I always loved singing, but I thought it was like drawing – just something you do in your own little corner to calm yourself down. But when my friend, the French songwriter Etienne Daho, listened to my songs, he was so moved that told me that I had to do a demo, share them with the world.

– Lou Doillon

I’m a very compulsive person, so I spend most of my time drawing or writing my diary, patching things up and carving bits of wood – I’ve carved two of my guitars.

– Lou Doillon

What I realized is that the desire for making ‘Places’ came from the fact that I’ve got this strange situation with having been born in the glitter, born on the other side of the mirror that everyone fantasizes about.

– Lou Doillon