Carmen Dell'Orefice Quotes

My life has been amazing. How many other ladies of 76 can say that the snapshot on their senior citizen's card was taken by Norman Parkinson?

The money I've earned has enabled me to keep my life in my own hands. I had a terrific body, and I got paid for using it.

We're all works of art in progress.

I exercise every day. I don't get up and have a cup of coffee anymore, I get up and move to get blood to my brain.

Fashion is more about taste than money - you have to understand your body and tailor clothes to your needs; it's all about the fit. I do the alterations myself - I'm quite a seamstress - it's the influence of my Hungarian mother.

Being on the cover of 'Vogue' at 15 meant nothing to me. I never really understood what it was they were looking at, what they saw in me.

I was the Kate Moss of my day, atypical of what the public wanted, which was Brigitte Bardot. I was always tall, skinny and angular. But now, society has bought 55 years of my marketing 'Carmen,' and I'm considered beautiful. I hope that empowers older women.

We are oceans apart. My mother had a very difficult life.

I have had more magazine covers in the last 25 years than I have had in my whole elongated career. Today I am in a territory that business considers unmarketable: age and white hair. Slowly, however, I started to own that territory little by little because I stood up for age.

We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.

My dream was to become a ballet dancer, but after a year in bed with rheumatic fever at 13, I had grown too tall, and had no muscle tone left. I tried a ballet class and couldn't even do a plie without falling over. It was my first death.

I understood that synergistic dance between photographer and object - 'muse,' if you will, 'model,' whatever you call us. It's that silent language of communication, like being psychic with each other.

I've grown up in the lap of the world.

As a model, I didn't have an identity; I was a chameleon, a silent actress. I was an amorphous thing. I wasn't full of personality, I was full of solitude and solemnity. I wasn't a cover-girl type.

When you understand how to do that dance, when the photographer says, 'Hold it, do it,' and you know you're getting it right, oh, the fun. It is fun.

You know, Italian-Hungarian - no matter how linear and cool I look on the outside, I have all that energy trying to find its way through life.

I respect Gloria Steinem enormously. But I never wanted to be in any kind of movement - and if you're over a certain age, you better keep your bra on because nothing's worse than saggy duds.

If your ceiling is falling down, don't you call someone in? I apply the same principle to myself.

I'm not giving in to anyone else's idea of how I ought to feel and look at 70. 'Retirement' is not a word I can even visualize. I retire when I go to bed!

I think America may be growing up and accepting the fact that the bulk of life exists beyond 50. Because demographically ... the vast population is over 50.

I didn't marry to have children. I married to have a relationship, and I was blessed with one child. I was an only child, too - my mother was smarter than most women today; she just had me.

There's always a boyfriend. Whatever else I have to give up on, I won't give up on love.

I'm loath to do interviews. What comes out is generally not what I meant or thought I was saying or thought they were asking.

I'm a working woman of 80 trying to work out what the image I can project is. How I can do it with, you know, dignity.