Quotes About French

Writing in French is one of my ambitions. I'd like to be able to dream one day in French. Italian and French are the two languages that I'd like to know.

When I am with French people, I am not aloof because I belong to them. My view is that the French president belongs to the French people, because he emanates from them. What I do is this: I am putting an end to the cronyism between politics and the media. For a president, constantly speaking to journalists, constantly being surrounded by journalists, has nothing to do with closeness to the people. A president should keep the media at arm's length.

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.

There was French kissing, and then there was Cajun French kissing. Spicier, harder, wilder.

I don't like people who speak French in public places. This includes the French.

I live in New York now, and miss France quite a bit. Of course, the reality of living in a small village in the south of France was very different than the fantasy I had of living in France. Over the years I spent there, that fantasy was worn away and I found a more realistic version of France than the one I began with. I wouldn't say the spell ever goes away, but transforms. Now that I understand French culture more intimately, and speak fluent French, I have a different, more solid, relationship to the country.

John Kerry speaks French fluently. Democrats are saying he's one in a million. A war hero who speaks French, isn't it more like one in a trillion?

The film The Conquest will be seen on many different levels and the American point of view is always more technical. The French are less technical - it's 'I like it, or I don't like it.' I hope that this film can have a life in the U.S. - it's the grand country of cinema. I grew up with Hollywood movies, so for a French director to have a film distributed in the U.S. is a real opportunity.

Some words, you know, it's amazing but some words would come only in French, and when I speak French, it would only come in English. And so the adjustment is very difficult sometimes.

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.

It wouldn't have existed without France, and it's a French initiative. As a filmmaker, I owe everything to France - I got accepted at a French film school that takes six directors a year. Once you're in, you make films under the eye of people in the industry. You grow up in front of their eyes.

I started to write because of my dream to become a filmmaker. I got to know about a film school in Paris and it was my goal to get there. To do that I knew I had to learn French. In order to practice I started to write journals in French. The effort I made to master what I regarded a bad thing - a language owned by the rich Moroccans - brought me the ability to write.

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.

I love French films, and European films. They're not any bigger, but there's just a sort of definition, and a confidence, and strength to them. I'd always, given the option, go and see a French drama. Obviously, we probably get the better ones. But they're just sophisticated on many levels, and grown up, and quite profound - and we don't make films like that.

I see myself as universal, not as a German, American, French or whatever, because we all live on this planet. We're all living on the earth.

The companies only developed if the state did not intervene in the French fashion. If on the contrary a certain degree of economic freedom was the rule, capitalism moved in firmly and adapted itself to all administrative quirks and difficulties

Steven Soderbergh really likes Irréversible, that's about all I can tell you. About the making, well, it was a very particular situation, because those people all know each other, and they're all big stars. I felt like the little French guy, really. And I was very flattered to be called on that, of course, but I felt like if I didn't find something to be a little original, different, particular in the movie, I would just disappear.

From the 15th century to 1688, England and Wales, like Scotland, had been peripheral kingdoms in the European power game, more often at war with each other that with Continental powers, and - except under Oliver Cromwell - scarcely very successful on those occasions when they did engage the Dutch, or the French, or the Spanish.

New Orleans: The least annoying French place on Earth.

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.

They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.

Good french cooking cannot be produced by a zombie cook.

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 shot for French and British Vogue. The British Vogue one featured clothes by Chloe and was shot at Highgate and the John Soane Museum. It came out much better in my opinion. I only did one day and was working with my own make-up and hair people and a model who I've known for years.

I was inspired by Colin Farrell in the fact that he's Irish and has freckles but with black hair. I'm a bunch of different things, Irish Polish, Native American, and French, but I wanted to tap into that Irish side and be freckle-y with black hair, so that's what I did.

I'm going to Iowa for an award. Then I'm appearing at Carnegie Hall, it's sold out. Then I'm sailing to France to be honored by the French government - I'd give it all up for one erection.

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.

I lifted my eyes to the heavens and asked for help because if God exists, there's no way he's French.

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

51% of the French people - who are not very religious - were thinking that what "Charlie Hebdo" did was unwise. They aren't asking for a law to prevent Charlie Hebdo from publishing caricatures, but they are calling on its editors to be a bit more sensible.

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.

No matter what their background, the southern French are fascinated by food.

I would like to express to all Londoners, to all of the British people, the solidarity, the compassion and the friendship of France and the French people.

I made a French film called "Merry Christmas" which is a very European film. It's a World War I piece.

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.

The annals of the French Revolution prove that the knowledge of the few cannot counteract the ignorance of the many.... The light of philosophy, when it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as the victims rather than the illuminators of the multitude.

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.

We are Germans. We are Armenians. French, Italian, Russian, American, Asian, African... many other nationalities. We are Christians, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu. We are black, we are white. We are a community of some many differences, so complex and yet so simple. We do not need to have war!

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil.

We were only there for five days and during that time Tom was a bit annoyed that the French were more interested in me and my schoolgirl outfit than him and his long scarf.

The best way to execute French cooking is to get good and loaded and whack the hell out of a chicken.

The French aren't perfect, but they have some parenting secrets that really do work.

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

I was born in France. My father was a renowned French philosopher and journalist, and my mother was a painter. So I grew up in Parisian intellectual circles.

Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would makemoney by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.