There is nothing like a comfortable adventure to put people in a good humor. . .

You don't like it when a French housewife gets mad at you. If she gets steam behind her, she is an unstoppable creature.

Sundays in France have a different atmosphere to other days, with fewer phone calls, no postman, no delivery men and no one banging on the door.

Why not make a daily pleasure out a daily necessity.

I'd rather live precariously in my own office than comfortably in somebody else's.

The funny thing in France is that writers are not allowed to retire, because the French government say you are still earning money from books you wrote 20 years ago.

Day after day we looked for rain, and day after day we saw nothing but the sun. Lavender that we had planted in the spring died. The patch of grass in front of the house abandoned its ambitions to become a lawn and turned into the dirty yellow of poor straw. The earth shrank, revealing its knuckles and bones, rocks and roots that had been invisible before.