71 Quotes by Jane Birkin

Big Ben... hearing the chimes makes me feel at home.

He painted me when I was young because he was in love with me, but now that he has loved me he doesn't paint me anymore.

If you fall in love with a country and its people, that makes any country warm to you.

I have never written a book about my life, despite being offered purses of gold. I made 'Boxes' because I wanted to make a sincere depiction of a daughter who has lost her father, or the jealousy one can feel towards a daughter who has become more beautiful than you and whose stepfather starts to take her shopping.

My father was a painter, so I was encouraged to take a sketchbook everywhere. Cameras are perishable, but I still have tonnes of sketchbooks from all the trips I've ever been on. It gets you by when you don't know what to give people as a gift; drawings are good souvenirs.

I know what it's like to have someone coming home who looks at you not in the way they used to in the old days, and I've seen my own face contorted with sadness and rage in the mirror.

There's no fun in a bag if it's not kicked around, so that it looks as if the cat's been sitting on it-and it usually has. The cat may even be in it! I always put on stickers and beads and worry beads. You can get them from Greece, Israel, Palestine-from anywhere in the world. I always hang things on my bags because I don't like them looking like everyone else's.

A Birkin bag is a very good rain hat; just put everything else in a plastic bag.

I don't know why people keep banging on about the '60s. I came from a conventional family and I didn't go off with different people - I rather wish I had now, seeing all the fun everyone else was having.