Quotes About French

French women have been made beautiful by the French people - they're very aware of their bodies, the way they move and speak, they're very confident of their sexuality. French society's made them like that

The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: 'I bet that if we called this something like `escargot,' tourists would eat it.' Then they had hearty laugh, because 'escargot' is the French word for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm.'

The key to the U.N.'s global warming study was man's use of aerosol spray. You have to know the French were involved in a study concluding that Arrid Extra Dry is destroying the Earth. In a world in which everyone smelled, the French would be at no disadvantage. Aerosol spray. How convenient.

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.

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 am attached to the French language. I will defend the ubiquitous use of French.

You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein? Because he hates America, he loves mistresses, and he wears a beret. He is French, people.

There was never a choice to sing in English or French, that's the thing. We started a band and sang right away in English. You reproduce the thing you like, and most of the bands we liked were coming from England or the U.S. We also came to cherish the fact that there was no one in France singing in English -we were so happy Phoenix to be the first. Even if we are traitors to France, our country, which I'll never understand, because we talk about things that are very French.

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.'

The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.

I only speak a little pigeon French. Just enough to get by with the little French pigeons.

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 think I get really into comfort music: '60s stuff, '50s stuff like Frankie Avalon. I love it - such simple songs, but so well written. That, and old French pop. I love that, because I don't speak French. It's all just pop music! But I love it because it just makes me focus on the melodies.

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

The French legend is a very simple one. All really beautiful clothes are designed in the houses of the French couturiers and all women want those clothes.

In France, they make you feel that you cannot be two things at the same time. You can't be French and Arabic; you can't be French and Muslim.

I became a pedant of the form. I did my graduate work in art history and particularly in the history of French satirical cartooning. And that made me aware of what a rich and resilient tradition this seemingly scabrous sacrilegious magazine still represented in French life.

I would argue, by the way, if the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping Champagne corks. It's a good thing. It keeps the French safe. It keeps the U.S. safe.

"Let us find the dam snack bar," Zoe said. "We should eat while we can." Grover cracked a smile. "The dam snack bar?" Zoe blinked. "Yes. What is funny?" "Nothing," Grover said, trying to keep a straight face. "I could use some dam French fries." Even Thalia smiled at that. "And I need to use the dam restroom."... I started cracking up, and Thalia and Grover joined in, while Zoe just looked at us "I do not understand." "I want to use the dam water fountain," Grover said. "And..." Thalia tried to catch her breath. "I want to buy a dam T-shirt."

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.

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;- on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

I actually go to the gym much more now than I did when I was on Buffy. I like to stay fit, because that's when I feel really healthy. But I never worked out for any kind of image. People have said to me, 'Do you starve yourself before photo shoots?' And I always say, 'No way.! That's what airbrushing is for. I had french fries last night.'

I'm always feeling like I don't belong, no matter where I am. So I'm just searching for a family nonstop, and sometimes I find it in the mosh pit, sometimes I find it when I'm doing some French TV show with the president's wife.

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

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

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

People say 'Why would you learn Dutch? Nobody speaks it. Why not French?' Even the Dutch say that to me! I say because I want to live here, I think it's only common courtesy that I speak the language.

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.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

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.

The scientific and societal achievements of the modern age are undisputable. But after the French Revolution, modernity increasingly emancipated itself from Christian roots, thereby becoming rootless itself.

I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day.

The stubby French painter Toulouse-Lautrec supposedly invented chocolate mousse - I find that rather hard to believe, but there you have 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.

The fact is, beneath the hype, Iraqis will soon appreciate American help and idealism far more than French perfidy. It is never wrong to be on the side of freedom - never.

What would be the difference if we retreated and let the French and Germans make decisions for the world? We tried that twice in the last century. Isolationsim, refusing to accept our role in the world, and delaying our response to evildoers ultimately cost fifty-three million lives in World War 2 alone. The preemption policy of the Bush administration, taking the war to the enemy and exporting democracy and freedom, has liberated fifty million.

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

Chef: Any cook who swears in French.

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

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

We French-Canadians belong to one country, Canada: Canada is for us the whole world: but the English-Canadians have two countries, one here and one across the sea.

[on going to Sunday school:] It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hay ricks and paper-covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars before Sunday school time.

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.

Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers's Centre Georges Pompidou of 1971-1977 - the true prototype of the modern museum as popular architectural spectacle - wound up costing so much more than planned that the French government solved the shortfall by cutting support for several regional museums.

Under the dominion of an idea, which possesses the minds of multitudes, as civil freedom, or the religious sentiment, the power ofpersons are no longer subjects of calculation. A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom, or conquest, can easily confound the arithmetic of statists, and achieve extravagant actions, out of all proportion to their means; as, the Greeks, the Saracens, the Swiss, the Americans, and the French have done.

The relentless pursuit of being different is very French.