Quotes About French

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

My way of remaining French was the financing scheme I used for Quest for Fire, with Fox funds, since it started as a 100% American production. The film was not in French and yet was French in style, reflecting my personality.

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.'

I cut the ribbon in Paris, and everyone in Paris speaks French — maybe you knew that. But I'm from Tennessee, and Tennessee girls don't speak French. So suddenly I'm stuck onstage with Minnie and Mickey and everyone is yelling at me in French — I guess they're telling me to get off the stage, but I didn't know what they were saying at the time, so I start dancing with Minnie and Mickey like on the show and finally my aunt comes and gets me off.

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.

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.

According to the management expert Peter F. Drucker, the term "entrepreneur" (from the French, meaning "one who takes into hand") was introduced two centuries ago by the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say to characterize a special economic actor-not someone who simply opens a business, but someone who "shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield." The twentieth-century growth economist Joseph A. Schumpeter characterized the entrepreneur as the source of the "creative destruction" necessary for major economic advances.

While I'm sure people in Britain have money worries, they don't have them like the French do. The French, however much money they have, are worried. They're a very stressed people. It seems to be a very essential component of the national psyche.

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.

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.

If I would want to have a huge audience, I would make American movies, not French movies, because there is a limit of course with French language. If I prefer to shoot in my own language, it is to play with my language, to play in my Paris, and I have complete freedom in France. It's so amazing. If American directors could imagine how free I am, they would have asked for political asylum immediately.

To the chefs who pioneered the nouvelle cuisine in France, the ancienne cuisine they were rebelling against looked timeless, primordial, old as the hills. But the cookbook record proves that the haute cuisine codified early in this century by Escoffier barely goes back to Napoleon's time. Before that, French food is not recognizable as French to modern eyes. Europe's menu before 1700 was completely different from its menu after 1800, when national cuisines arose along with modern nations and national cultures.

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

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

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.

I'm ready to become a French person amongst French people, and more than ever I have the love for my country deeply ingrained in my heart.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French.

I cannot prevent the French from being French

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.

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.

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

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

The U.S. directed the war against South Vietnam. There was a political settlement in 1954. But in the late '50's the United States organized an internal repression in South Vietnam, not using its troops, but using the local apparatus it was constructing. This was a very significant and very effective campaign of violence and terrorism against the Vietminh - which was the communist-led nationalist force that fought the French. And the Vietminh at that time was adhering to the Geneva Accords, hoping that the political settlement would work out in South Vietnam.

Children don't just play any more - they're far too busy learning to fence and taking extra French classes. In the end, you're actually doing more damage to your children by trying to hot-house them. It's far better to remain a calm parent.

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

If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.

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 word impossible is not French.

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.

What Abraham Lincoln had to face was a culturally and politically cohesive bloc of states comprising half the country, refusing to discuss even the limitation of slavery; while he had only the most feeble means of enforcement. The British and the French could do their emancipating at a distance; Lincoln had armed resistance almost literally at his doorstep.

The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won't be running away from it or hiding from it.

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 American people are not naifs who yearn for isolationism, but they are starting to ask some hard questions about the way we have been doing business for 50 years, and it may well be time to grant the French, Canadians, Germans, Turks, South Koreans, and a host of others their wishes for independence from us: polite friendship - but no alliances, no bases, no money, no trade concessions, and no more begging for the privilege of protecting them.

Being French, to me, is first and foremost being a revolutionary.

The religious conflicts of the Reformation era were never simply and only about religion, because religion during this era as in the Middle Ages that preceded it, informed and was meant to inform every domain of life. Violence involving religion and touching other areas of life took many forms: from the Protestant destruction of Catholic religious art and objects in iconoclasm, to Catholic executions of Protestants who refused to renounce their views, to major destructive conflicts such as the French Wars of Religion and the Thirty Years' War.

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

In language gender is particularly confusing. Why, please, should a table be male in German, female in French, and castrated in English?

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

My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.

They were singing in French, but the melody was freedom and any American could understand that.

When I moved to Paris in the '70s, there wasn't very much going on in film in England. So when I started doing French films, there was a natural movement toward the kind of films I wanted to do. It wasn't the reason I came, but it so happened that I stepped into a time and place that actually corresponded to what I wanted. That sometimes happens in life. And it was rather beautiful.

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

Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.

If I knew of something that could serve my nation but would ruin another, I would not propose it to my prince, for I am first a man and only then a Frenchman... because I am necessarily a man, and only accidentally am I French.

stoicism is the fundamental characteristic of the French.

Gregory Peck was so charismatic. I saw a woman fall down - fall down! - when she saw him in a restaurant. And Brando. We were in London, and by then he was about 380 pounds. There was a gorgeous waitress, and off he went, in direct competition with me for this young girl's attention, speaking French, making her blush.