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We have to be able to grow up. Our wrinkles are our medals of the passage of life. They are what we have been through and who we want to be. I don't think I will ever cut my face, because once I cut it, I'll never know where I've been.

I hope to do modeling till I am 100. There is a chance. My mom just turned 96.

I feel a bit like a fantastic granny to all the gap-toothed models today. There's this British one, Adwoa Aboah, who founded Gurls Talk (2016). She's deeply beautiful. She's the most wonderful, shocking beauty to come around in a long time.

[her beauty advice] Drinking as much water as you can. Eight glasses a day. Sleep. Taking pleasure for yourself, being your own good mother -- mother yourself. With the forces of life, we often neglect ourselves too much. I try to go out and see movies I care about. An awful lot are worth it. I like to read and see my friends and my sweetheart. Take time for what moves you and what will make you happy.

Parasita (2019) -- I saw it three mornings in a row, at Sixth Avenue. That movie, every word was important. You see both sides very equally. You see where they made terrible divergences and why it happened. I would like to see that movie for the rest of my life. I love that movie because I learned something, and that's what keeps me young, as long as I can keep doing it.

[on making Gigolô Americano (1980)] Everyone knew it was great, that it was ahead of its time. Paul Schrader had been trying to get it made for ten years. He's a genius idea man, and a genius producer. He was one of the first people to use popular music the way he did in that film, with Blondie. Originally, John Travolta had the lead role. He was fresh off of Os Embalos de Sábado à Noite (1977) and Grease: Nos Tempos da Brilhantina (1978), which together had made a quarter of a billion dollars. There were entire rooms in Paramount stuffed with his fan mail. What happened was, two weeks before we were to start, John's mother died. He was just a 24 year-old kid. He was in real agony, and we became very close friends. Then his dad had a heart attack. So John asked for a two week extension so he could pull himself together emotionally, and also lose some of the weight he'd put on during this time. And they wouldn't give him an extension. Everyone was going to sue him. It was just a mess. So what John had to do to get out of it, was give Paramount a deal where they chose his movies, and he had no say. And prior to that, John had what no other actor in town had, which was final cut. Plus, John was very romantic. If John had played the role, it would have been much more romantic and you would have seen the gigolo kiss. With Richard Gere, you never really see the gigolo kissing. You see everything leading up to it. You see his expertise in dressing, more than his expertise at romance.

When I was 47, I returned to modeling and I asked that my photos shouldn't be retouched. Women stopped me on the street and told me that for a long time they felt ignored and invisible and seeing me in magazines made them feel that they weren't invisible anymore.

[on the culture of sexual abuse] It's always stunning. There's something made in men to believe that they're desperately wanted and they're not.

[on the taboo of sex at her age, 74] I am having sex at my age, and have no intention to stop. Boy, I love it, it was always my favorite thing, right up there with my best travel, and maybe higher. It was the most interesting thing to me, and the most joyful, and the most fun, and the most everything. And age only helps you drive a vehicle better.

The first time I was in Paris was with Irving Penn, shooting the Paris collections. They asked me to put on a real leopard coat. I was twisted up because you can't refuse -- I was only 24. But I'd made my first trip to Africa and knew leopards were disappearing at the speed of light. So I told Irving Penn and he decided that we wouldn't shoot it. Then Diana Vreeland heard about it and soon made it a policy at Vogue that they wouldn't shoot leopard. Then, much later, she told me she would talked to friends in Washington, and some years later they made a law against it in America.

Aging is the point of life, if you're lucky. Hopefully, it's growing up. You get to be wise. That's the point. You read, you talk to the smartest people in the world and listen to them.

[on landing the Vogue Italia cover a month before she is 74] I had never felt prouder in my life, and right now I feel even prouder. I've had a record, 27 covers of American Vogue, and I've had 13 other Vogue covers, but this is the most important I have ever done, the one that has made me feel most useful. I've been thinking about it for a while, but it took Vogue Italia's courage to make it true. This is a cover that can change society, because it shows a woman who is vibrant, attractive, who still laughs, and who for the first time is a woman my age.

Burt Reynolds is one of the best directors I've ever had, without question. One of the greatest things he ever did in Gator, O Implacável (1976) was, he tricked me. There was a part of the script, at the end, where I was supposed to laugh and cry simultaneously. I had no clue how I was going to do that. So you remember the big scene at the end where we're in love, but we part ways, and he goes home and I go off to New York to become a big anchorwoman. So we kiss at my porch, and I'm crying and he walks out of frame. And as soon as he gets behind the camera, he goes into this Groucho Marx walk and grins back at me, and I just scream with laughter! So that was very clever. He's a very good man, a very good actor, and a spectacular director.

[on the children she never had] One of the things that scare me the most is a thing that I saw in print about myself: "She has it all" -- the career, the boyfriend, the this, the that. I don't think you can have it all of anything, life is about choices, everyday. I came to see the world, and I was working to be able to do it. When I finally told myself that I wanted to have a child, Bob told me that he didn't want one. I now have to admit maybe I never wanted one, either. And that's fine.

Life is truly a carnival, and I got an awful lot of that. I was lucky.

I spent a lot of the 1980s living in a loft in New York, and painting. I figured I was rich enough to do what I wanted, and I painted almost full-time. I hung out with people like Julian Schnabel and Jean Michel Basquiat. Andy Warhol used to cook on his roof for me. He was an exquisite cook, just unbelievable. So I had this amazing group of friends, and I watched their children being born and raised and it was very real and very bohemian, in many ways. But the other part of my life in the '80s was making movie, after movie, after movie. I usually stayed in Beverly Hills when I was in town, and I had this other rich, sort of "limo life that I lived. It was sort of a nice balance for me.

[on the first model to win a million-dollar contract] I read on the front page of the New York Times about the great baseball player Catfish Hunter saying he needed a million-dollar contract because "he was in a youth-oriented business." I thought, Bingo! I'd just turned 31 and that was old, back in those ridiculous days. I yelled across the room to my very smart sweetheart and said, "I need a modeling contract. What do I do?" He didn't even look up from his paper, "Cosmetic companies. They have the most money. Tell your photographers and your agent that you won't do any more cosmetic ads without a contract." Richard Avedon took some photos and showed them to Charles Revson (the founder and owner of Revlon), who loved them. It changed the business for everyone. Within a month, there were no more one-hour jobs. At the time, we used to do six jobs a day for $60 an hour. There were only full-day rates for $1,500. And then within the year, there were 4 more contracts for models, and that's how the whole thing started.

I usually get into bed with a good book or a good man.

I started reading when I was 9, swimming when I was 20, modeling at 22 -- the age when a model's career is normally over -- and acting at 27.

Corporations are usually at least 10 years behind the times, stuck in their past successes like quicksand. That's a reason why I like StriVectin. The executives (mostly women) are smart enough to know that women over 40 have value, and that women in their 70s are still vibrant and thriving. It's the new age of aging. It's taken years to get here and I'm glad to be a part of it. I have always said that if my life could stand for one thing, it would be to change the way women feel about getting older.

[on the 2016-2017 presidential election] Hillary being a woman certainly was a big part about her not getting elected. That, and the fact that the Russians managed to turn Internet into a nuclear bomb. Except for the big cities, there's very little real information going out in America. They watch Fox News, I only watched it once and it scared me, it was a bastion for a fat old man lusting after young good-looking women. Let me quote Confucius: "One humane family can humanize a whole state, one courteous family can lift a whole state into courtesy; one grasping and perverse man can drive a state into chaos". That's my country, right now.

[on her active environmentalism] I heard Al Gore speak before he won the Nobel, at a party for Oceana. I'm a diver, and oceans are dying all over the world. Since I began traveling in the early 1960s, I've watched everything change globally from small to massively overdeveloped. We've become an animal run amok. What we really need to look at is religions, and how they're driving us to extinction. I think we're in danger of becoming Easter Island, of just vanishing the way those people did, and leaving these huge totems behind for future generations to ponder. We're at such a critical time and I think the human race is at a very fine line in terms of whether we're going to make it or not. The apathy is what's really scary.