"I may move from everywhere and spend two or three years in total isolation. I like being alone a lot. I enjoy that more than anything."

"I'm an adaptable nomad. I love Paris, I've been living in Los Angeles and New York since 1990. I love London, too. My roots are inside of me."

"I was six years old when I saw my first Godard movie, eight when I first experienced Bergman. I wanted to be a director when I was fourteen."

Delpy says that as the only child of actors in Paris' avant-garde underground theater, she grew up poor, and though she now makes a good living, she just hasn't acquired a taste for material things: "I live the same way I did ten years ago. People tell me: "You have money now, spend it. Go there and there." But I don't want to. I don't want to go to the Bahamas on holiday. I hate islands. I want to go to Brittany, where it's cold and raining, and there's nothing fancy about it."

"I've never made the first move in my whole life - I'm too scared", she says. "I couldn't kiss someone first. I'm extremely shy. I'm, like, so shy that actually... it's very painful what I'm going to say, but I don't think I've ever been with someone I really loved, because the people I really cared for, I didn't have, you know, the nerve to go after."

"Really getting to know someone takes time. I was reading Rainer Maria Rilke's "On Love and Other Difficulties" the other day. He was saying the only way of really living with someone is to grow parallel lives; otherwise it becomes destructive. You grow together, but separately. I guess friendship is very much like that, too, where you're able to grow next to one another, but don't try to strangle the other person."

French actress Julie Delpy says she is happily single and wonders why so many people insist on being in couples. "Too many women throw themselves into romance because they're afraid of being single, then start making compromises and losing their identity. I won't do that."

"If Woody Allen called me, I'd be there straight away. Who wouldn't? Truly."

About her feature directing project "Tell Me" (which she also cowrote): "I've been shooting these video movies, which I'm pretty excited about, but this is my first 35 millimeter feature. I think, because I started in this business so young, at 14, and I worked very early with so many great directors, that I was artistically ready to direct at 18. But because I worked with so many great directors, I wasn't secure enough to do that. Now I just say, "Why not? What's to fear?"