Quotes About French

In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despitethe fact that the American Revolution was successful--realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime--while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.

I love French stuff. Mmmm, french fries.

In France cooking is a serious art form and a national sport. I think the French enjoy the complication of the art form and the cooking for cooking's sake. You can talk with a concierge or police officer about food in France as a general rule. It is not the general rule here. Classical cuisine, which I hope we are going back to, means certain ways of doing things and certain ways of not doing things. If you know classical French cooking you can do anything. If you don't know the basics, you turn out slop.

I have been in countries where I don't know a word of the language. I tried to practice my French as much as possible. I would talk with the crew. I always order in French, but then waiters respond in English. I hate that.

I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style.

[Trading] With the French one had to be especially careful. French oarswomen were known to take men aside, point to whatever they wanted, and then peel off their own shirts. It took great presence of mind to bargain with a half-naked Frenchwoman.

When I was a young man, my friends and I and all of us in New York were very influenced by French cinema. French cinema played an enormous influence on those of us who wanted to be filmmakers.

The French just said he was a damned nuisance. Or they would have had they the good fortune to speak English. Instead being French they were forced to say it in their own language.

Antiwhite racism is developing in sections of our cities where individuals - some of whom have French nationality - contemptuously designate French people as gaulois on the pretext they don't share the same religion, color or origins.

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.

The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralization of state power will be useful for the centralization of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the center of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 until now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organizationally.

There is a song of Gainsbourg that Jane Birkin sang, and the words are beautiful in French. It says, "Le jeu et les moi." It's impossible to translate, because it has a very nice sound. It sounds so lovely in French. So I took that because it was the subject: I and myself and myself and I. Which is, in a way, boring, because it is a contradiction.

I am not a priest, I am not an imam, I am not a rabbi and I am implementing the French laws on every French citizen.

Most, actually, German actors have like some speaking of French. So, the French wasn't the problem. But, I was having a problem with them doing my dialogue in English. And it wasn't a matter of fluency.

I don't flatter myself with much dependence upon the present disposition of the Eastern Indians, who are many ways liable to be drawn into a rupture with us by the artifices of the French, their own weakness and the influence which the French Missionary Priests have over them.

The French probably invented the very notion of discretion. It's not that they feel that what you don't know won't hurt you; they feel that what you don't know won't hurt them. To the French lying is simply talking.

Imperialism has now reached a degree of almost scientific perfection. It uses White workers to conquer the non-white workers of The Colonies. Then, it hurls the non-white workers of one colony against those of another non-white colony. Finally, it relies on the Colored workers of the colonies to rule the White workers. Recently, White French soldiers near mutiny in the occupied Ruhr of Germany, were surrounded by French African soldiers, and colored native light-infantry were sent against White German strikers.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Race wasn't an issue. My family was French, but Yorkville was a melting pot of races and cultures.

To Americans Boris Vian has long been one of the hidden glories of French literature. In I Spit on Your Graves, he wrote an utterly untypical work, a blast from his Id that may well have killed him. Even now, with misogyny disguised as racial justice, its venom remains potent and disturbing, in equal parts appalling and riveting. It is a singular book, not for the squeamish, and not to be passed by.

Democracy, thus French revolution, was not invented by philosophic theory nor by the bourgeois leadership. It was discovered by the masses in their method of action.

I painted with my husband a portrait of a naked Serge Gainsbourg draped with a French flag, and it hangs in our bedroom. I love gritty and dark art like what the German couple Herakut does.

You can't have a novel without real, believable people, and once you get into either too theoretical a novel or too philosophical a novel, you get into the dangers that the French novel has discovered in the past 50 or 60 years. And you get into a sort of aridity. No, you have to have real, identifiable people to whom the reader reacts in a way as if they were real people.

The French would eat anything that couldn't outrun them.

[The Women's Room by Marilyn French] was in my house somewhere, blew my mind, I was changed forever. And then I continued to read it at various points in my life, and it sort of opens up in a different way.

I know never to take a wine for granted. Drawing a cork is like attendance at a concert or at a play that one knows well, when there is all the uncertainty of no two performances ever being quite the same. That is why the French say, 'There are no good wines, only good bottles.'

Culture and tradition have to change little by little. So 'new' means a little twist, a marriage of Japanese technique with French ingredients. My technique. Indian food, Korean food; I put Italian mozzarella cheese with sashimi. I don't think 'new new new.' I'm not a genius. A little twist.

French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety.

Now, now. Southern ladies don’t French-kiss and tell.

Theatre has no national identity. It is something for the world, whether it is Irish, English, or French.

My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.

Very often with an American movie, the end is very happy and you just feel good when you go out. When you go to a French movie, it's kind of like, "oh!", and you can't go out; you're stuck in your chair. It goes so deeply inside of the heart.

I loved American universities. In many ways, they are better organized - certainly than French universities.

I am very favorable to the Bourse, to a sale, to what is useful to grow, maintaining jobs, the Made in Italy. It doesn't make any sense and it's parochial to think otherwise. Investors can be French, Russian, as long as they help a business grow.

Mainly I was able to perform with music - I played the French horn, I would sing, and I was a drummer in the pipe band. So I think it was a way to show off.

Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.

If a lump of soot falls into the soup and you cannot conveniently get it out, stir it well in and it will give the soup a French taste.

Do you realize that in the past sixty years, the only foreigners the French have been able to drive out are American tourists?

Think of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron, Ciudadanos in Spain, Nowoczesna in Poland. These are early efforts to reimagine a liberalism which is neither right-wing nor left-wing in the traditional sense.

I think it's important to be sincere. And I could be the most sincere just staying in [my] mother language actually. And that's the reason why I stay composing and writing in French.

When I hear myself speak French, I look at myself differently. Certain aspects will feel closer to the way I feel or the way I am and others won't. I like that - to tour different sides of yourself. I often find when looking at people who are comfortable in many languages, they're more comfortable talking about emotional stuff in a certain language or political stuff in another and that's really interesting, how people relate to those languages.

I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

I don’t like water. I drink Diet Coke. Nor do I smoke, or drink alcohol or even sip a café. I don’t look after myself. I don’t do yoga, Pilates, those things. I hate physical effort, I don’t run anywhere, but I am super-energetic. Make-up? I just black my eyes and that’s it. My hair? I get it cut on set (fashion shoots), I never go to a hairdresser. I’m not sure I’m French. You think I’m not smart enough?

I like food too much to go on some crazy diet. French fries are my favorite downfall.

I feel pretty stupid that I don't know any foreign languages. I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese.

Contrary to what certain comedians have led you to believe, the national French pastime is picnicking.

I wish I had taken Spanish instead of French in high school. I could eavesdrop on a lot more conversations on the subway if I knew Spanish.

I don't even know what being left wing means anymore. I feel that the left/right spectrum has been so fundamentally scrambled primarily by the politics around globalization - and you saw it in Brexit, you saw it in the French election, you see it in our election, it's happening everywhere.