Quotes About French

When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.

I'd had a French education for three years, my father being in the army. From 9 to 12, I went to French school. I've been sort of part of the culture, part of the geography, since I was quite young - the imprint was there. And I loved it.

I have many, many editions of the books, and they are all rather different. In the end, the one I used was the most recent French translation. French suits the tales well, and it's a beautiful translation. The Italian one is good as well... English has fallen short.

The Iranian government prevented journalists from marching in solidarity with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre yet it organized flag-burning protests against the French embassy, that hasn't ingratiated them to a French nuclear negotiating team that is deeply cynical about the nature of the Iranian regime.

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.

I like French fries," I say. I like French fries? I sound like a slow child in a made-for-TV movie.

The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be a neighbor, there is anunsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it. Let him build himself a log house with the bark on where he is, fronting IT, and wage there an Old French war for seven or seventy years, with Indians and Rangers, or whatever else may come between him and the reality, and save his scalp if he can.

Basically the French are all peasants.

I went to a French school, so we didn't study Bram Stoker there. I just thought it was a genius thing.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

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.

French girls still have the Jane Birkin culture. You can go just like that, without makeup, without managing your hair.

After all, we are not French and never can be, and any attempt to be so is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface.

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.

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

New Orleans: The least annoying French place on Earth.

So why, after prior successes, did Obama's race/class/gender attack finally sputter out like the French at Waterloo?

One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do.

Because French is the language of love, my boy. Something you should keep in mind, but will soon forget.

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.

Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.

The French philosopher Pierre-Hyacinthe Azaïs (1766-1845) formalized the statement that good and evil fortune are exactly balanced in that they produce for each person an equivalent result.

For someone like me and my generation, you had to speak French to be sophisticated, you had to be lighter-skinned.

All my life, I have loved and been inspired by French cinema, and as a studio head it has been my pride and joy to have the ability to bring movies to audiences around the world.

There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits. (Preface to the French edition).

A certain type of critic doesn't really want French movies to be visual. They think movies started from books and they forgot this part of moviemaking, like Chaplin and Buster Keaton, which I didn't forget.

But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.

You chose to come to Paris, of all places,” Mencheres replied. So what? Got something against the French?

What makes international cinema so interesting is that each territory has its own sensibility. When you look at an Indian or French film, there's a certain flavor. And even though the language is different, if the film is successful, it has something very common and understandable.

Whether it's destiny or fate or whatever, I don't think I could do a French Laundry anywhere else.

My home has a split personality. Some of the rooms are very French antique. Think Aubusson rugs, turquoise ceramic jugs, sandbag pillows, and broken birdcages. The other half is very Aztec. Neon ikat fabric pillows, vintage books piled up to the ceiling, and shutters from Bali.

If we can sleep without dreaming, it is well that painful dreams are avoided. If, while we sleep, we can have any pleasing dreams, it is as the French say, tant gagne, so much added to the pleasure of life.

The odour of Burgundy, and the smell of French sauces, and the sight of clean napkins and long loaves, knocked as a very welcome visitor at the door of our inner man.

I'm fascinated by the new iPhone. I bought it and kept trying to use it in France. "Siri, what is a good restaurant?" (In a robotic voice.) "I'm sorry, Robin. I can't give locations in France." "Why, Siri?" "I don't know." It's like she was upset with the French or something. "They seem to have an attitude I can't understand. Should I look for Germans, Robin?"

In the end, the best part of the whole book [The Nightingale ] to me was the research, reading about the courageous, ordinary French women who put their lives on the line to save others. It was really inspirational.

I do love this people [the French] with all my heart, and think that with a better religion and a better form of government and their present governors their condition and country would be most enviable.

Politically, [Albert Camus] was in favour of a federation, and effectively he considered that like South Africa today (or as they are trying to do), there should be a mixed population with equal rights, the same rights for the Arab and the French populations, as well as all the other races living there.

I don't know what it is about the french language, it seems to be scared of coming out of the mouth so it comes out the nose instead.

Let's not forget, there are three languages in Canada - English, French, and there's the language of jobs.

Accents are very sexy. American girls who speak French are very attractive to a Frenchman. Anything exotic or different is attractive.

French women eat and serve what's in season, for maximum flavor and value, and know availability does not equal quality.

We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.

The central symbol for Canada-and this based on numerous instances of its occurrence in both English and French Canadian literature-is undoubtedly Survival, la Survivance.

The most skillful is Thierry Henry, he has impressed me the most. He's played a great tournament(Euro '00). He has the pace of Anelka, and the sense of Trezeguet. He's got something that no French player has ever had. He can do everything: from scoring goals, to giving assists, crossing and creating space for other players, and he fights for every ball. I've never see a player in France like him

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

I am a believer in passing the ball on the ground, I was lucky to be part of teams like that at Arsenal, with the French national team and with Monaco and at Barcelona. I know you can win in other ways, but I believe that is the way football should be played.

There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.

It's because of this massive immigration and more in some places, (that) France's image has undeniably changed. There are a number of neighborhoods where you are no longer living a French life. That's undeniable.