Art & Creativity Quote by Catherine Deneuve

There is a particular kind of glamour in admitting you wanted a different life: not a grand regret, more a quiet sidestep into an alternate self. When Catherine Deneuve says she “would have liked maybe” to be in architecture or painting, the hedging matters. It’s the language of someone who knows how myth hardens around a face, and refuses to let the myth be the whole story. “Maybe” loosens the grip of destiny; it frames her career not as fate but as one path among others.

Choosing architecture and painting is also revealing. These aren’t vague “creative” jobs; they’re disciplines of structure and seeing. Architecture is public, lasting, and collaborative, the opposite of film’s ephemerality and the way an actress’s labor can vanish into editing, lighting, and the audience’s projection. Painting is solitary authorship, a space where the gaze belongs to the maker, not the viewer. Subtext: she’s spent decades being composed like an artwork and wants to point to the craft of composing.

The line lands inside Deneuve’s broader cultural position: a performer long treated as an emblem of French taste, elegance, and chilly control. By invoking the fine arts, she both confirms and complicates that label. It’s not name-dropping sophistication; it’s a small act of agency, a reminder that the “icon” is also a worker with preferences, curiosity, and an internal life that doesn’t have to be legible on screen.