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.

We need French chaplains and imams, French-speaking, who learn French, who love France. And who adhere to its values. And also French financing.

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.

The Second World War had a precipitating effect in that it discredited the empires, as well as bankrupting them. Not only could you no longer, if you were a colonial subject of France in Africa, look to France as a model of power and influence and civility after what had happened in the war. Nor could the French any longer afford to run their empire. And nor could the British, although they were not discredited in the way that the French were.

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.

That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.

French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody's afraid of French fries.

It's true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it's a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.

I think British men build up the idea of us French girls having some magic extra sex appeal so much, they lose their heads. I can't really understand the whole thing - but it makes me laugh. It's such a cliche to think all French girls are well dressed, elegant, sophisticated and sexy. Some are utter slobs, I promise you that.

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.

Ho joined the French socialist party, the first Vietnamese to be a member of a French political party.

all the French speak French - even the children. Many Americans and Britishers who visit the country never quite adjust to this, and the idea persists that the natives speak the language just to show off or be difficult.

Movies in this country, its very complicated, and we could bang on about it forever, but the French movie industry is very different because its very obviously French.

My film is actually very critical of the level of French we're using back home. To have an immigrant from an ancient French colony come and do that is a little critical of our education system back home. Balzac is definitely over their heads. It's meant to be funny also because it would be also probably too much for kids in France, but kids in France would know who Balzac is. But, back home at that age, I guarantee you they don't know who he is.

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

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.

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.

Weep not for little Leonie, abducted by a French Marquis. Though loss of honor was a wrench, just think how it's improved her French.

Anybody who French bashes just might as well wear a badge that says 'I am a follower! I don't think for myself and I have no idea what I'm talking about.' That would be a French basher.

It is rarely remembered now that socialism in its beginnings was frankly authoritarian. It began quite openly as a reaction against the liberalism of the French Revolution. The French writers who laid its foundation had no doubt that their ideas could be put into practice only by a strong dictatorial government. The first of modern planners, Saint-Simon, predicted that those who did not obey his proposed planning boards would be 'treated as cattle'.

My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.

This (French-Kissing) is a really sexy thing to do, according to the French people, although you should bear in mind that they also like to eat snails.

I cannot prevent the French from being French

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.

There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell's dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

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.

The consequences of things are not always proportionate to the apparent magnitude of those events that have produced them. Thus the American Revolution, from which little was expected, produced much; but the French Revolution, from which much was expected, produced little.

I am still associated with a heroic period in French cinema, and my name remains linked to this period.

My mother did not carry me around under her arm like a loaf of French bread the way former Governor Palin carries her son Trig around looking for sympathy and votes.

Once I caught my dad in front of the TV watching a tennis match, and I realized they were tricking us. Poor guy, he had to sneak in a tennis final - probably the French Open.

The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know.

Well, I think they're going to learn that an awful lot of French people changed their minds. In 1940, the Third Republic had made a miserable mess of it.

[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.

The welfare state is institutionalized crime - 'organized plunder,' as the French economist Frederic Bastiat called it. It systematizes what is intrinsically wrong: forcing some people to support others. The Democrats favor the indefinite expansion of the welfare state, perpetually increasing the ratio of force to freedom in society.

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

The word impossible is not French.

Just speak very loudly and quickly, and state your position with utter conviction, as the French do, and you'll have a marvelous time!

The whole process of music for me is something absolutely honest and really naked and bare, so I never forced myself to write in French.

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

In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.

It's easy to forget how central the French people are in everything we mean when we say Europe.

When I came to North America, it was hard. It was hard to understand, hard to get someone to understand me. I only knew Russian. I studied French in school, but it didn't help. I forgot most of that.

The Treatise of the Three Impostors is a book that enjoyed centuries of notorious nonexistence until (as Voltaire would say) it became necessary to invent it. Georges Minois writes with empathy, erudition, and a novelist's sense of buildup and timing, weaving in the parallel story of Europe's courageous freethinkers. In the face of today's social and even legal pressures against criticizing religion, it is good to see an honorable French tradition asserting itself.

those two wholesome defects of the French people, malice and curiosity, both of which are essential to its greatness.

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.

French women typically think about good things to eat. American women typically worry about bad things to eat.