Quotes About French

French women love to shop and prepare food. They love to talk about what they have bought and made. It's a deeply natural love, but one that is erased in many other cultures. Most French women learn it from their mothers, some from their fathers. But if your parents aren't French, you can still learn it yourself.

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.

France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.

[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.

If I am right the Germans will say I was a German, and the French will say I was a Jew; If I am wrong the Germans will say I was a Jew and the French will say I was a German.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work, I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money, pay for food and put bread on the table.

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

In France you cannot not have lunch. If you stopped the French from having lunch, you will have a second revolution, I can tell you this. Not going to work - it is part of the French privilege.

I think that what people abroad want from French film, inside French film becomes our worst fear, "Oh, another film about love!"

Many Europeans think that all Moroccans speak French, but no. I had to make an effort to learn it when I studied French literature at the university in Rabat.

Ever since I first visited New Orleans back in '89, I've been intrigued by the French Quarter. I always wanted to set something in the Quarter, whether it was historic or contemporary. Unfortunately, I was always tied up with previous commitments - earlier multiple contracts - and could not get a crack at it.

German and English firms operate internationally, while French firms do not. The only place where they all have work is in China. Anybody can sell himself in China!

The only way the French are going in is if we tell them we found truffles in Iraq.

I don't have to 'freedom-kiss' my wife when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.

Wine is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment; it is an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life, from the snack to the feast, from the conversation at the local cafT to the speech at a formal dinner.

Nothing is as depressing as absolute logic. Look at the maze of French politics perpetrated by a logical people.

You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.

I had acne late, in college. My skin used to be really flawless. Went to college, became a vegetarian, ate a lot of cheese - big mistake. Here I am trying to be healthy and I'm eating grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries every day, having mad eruptions all over my face.

There's still a bit of a problem, in that so many leading English roles are taken by American or French actresses.

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

My father's Peruvian! I actually have a lot of family in Cuzco. I'm also Swiss, Alaskan, French, Spanish and Italian.

We need the security standards to apply to the internet. We need to be able to trust that when we send our emails through Verizon, that Verizon isn't sharing with the NSA, that Verizon isn't sharing them with the FBI or German intelligence or French intelligence or Russian intelligence or Chinese intelligence.

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses; never, I believe, by people.

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

Why would we expect the French to fight to liberate the Iraqis when they wouldn't fight to liberate themselves?

This is the end and the beginning of an age. This is something far greater than the French Revolution or the Reformation and we live in it.

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.

I cling to the basic set of tenets laid out in Tom Wolfe's 'New Journalism' - to get out there like the great French novelists of the 19th century and study life. I am a Tom Wolfe fan of the first order.

I did not want to be taken for a fool-the typical French reason for performing the worst of deeds without remorse.

I love languages (I speak French and Spanish and have been studying Russian) and accents; so one definite dream role would be being able to combine those elements into a character.

So we came to the Ritz hotel and the Ritz Hotel was divine. Because when a girl can sit in a delightful bar and have delicious champagne cocktails and look at all the important French people in Paris, I think it is divine.

Its true, Im the youngest, highest-grossing French director. I have a few records, but no one knows or simply doesnt care. Thats good, because I like that. Ultimately, I want to keep working, making a lot of movies, and get better at it. Its about finding great scripts and bringing them to life.

The French make two mistakes about me. They think I'm an intellectual because I wear these glasses and they think I'm an artist because my films lose money.

The Parisian is to the French what the Athenian was to the Greeks: no one sleeps better than he, no one is more openly frivolous and idle, no one appears more heedless. But this is misleading. He is given to every kind of listlessness, but when there is glory to be won he may be inspired with every kind of fury. Give him a pike and he will enact the tenth of August, a musket and you have Austerlitz. He was the springboard of Napoleon and the mainstay of Danton. At the cry of "la patrie" he enrols, and at the call of liberty he tears up the pavements. Beware of him!

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.

How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.

There is no French town in which the wounds inflicted on the battle-field are not bleeding.

I perfectly understood President Obama's attitude throughout the French presidential campaign. He had no reason to distance himself from Nicolas Sarkozy. It's the basic solidarity that leaders who worked together owe to each other.

The French and the British are such good enemies that they can't resist being friends.

I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.

French, for example, is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.

We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere. We hope its proclamation by the General Assembly will be an event comparable to the proclamation in 1789 [of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man], the adoption of the Bill of Rights by the people of the U.S., and the adoption of comparable declarations at different times in other countries.

To be with another woman, that is French. To be caught, that is American.

"Parisienne" is about how you forge a life in a new place when you are 18. And it's about a Lebanese girl who discovers Paris and the French in the 90s, and through these encounters, discovers herself.

The terrible tabulation of the French statists brings every piece of whim and humor to be reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats shoes, or marries his grandmother, then, in every twenty thousand, or thirty thousand, is found one man who eats shoes, or marries his grandmother.

In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.

The murders in Paris are sickening, we stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press.

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'.