As the winter set in with its customary Canadian severity the real trouble of the French began. They did not suffer from the cold, but they were dying of scurvy.
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.
I am fluent in Spanish and I understand French, Italian and Portuguese.
In the 1930s, there were so many different conflicts going on between the British, the French, the Russians, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Romanians and so on.
The French colonisation of Algeria lasted a long time: 132 years.
I have made an art form of the interview. The French are the best interviewers, despite their addiction to the triad, like all Cartesians.
After 10 years of French torture – psychological torture – it’s great to do an American movie.
My father’s Peruvian! I actually have a lot of family in Cuzco. I’m also Swiss, Alaskan, French, Spanish and Italian.
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn’t choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity.
America thrives on identity politics, left and right. But France is opposed to the idea. Since the Revolution, the French have enthroned the idea of universalism. All of us must be equal before the law as abstract individuals, and that extends to the arts.
I love Parisian hotels. I usually stay in either Le Bristol, which is gorgeous, or Hotel Paris Rivoli, which is very French and feels like a step back in time. I also love the luxury of Waldorf Astoria hotels.
I’m most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.
The only people who didn’t like The Monkees were the French, and they don’t even like themselves, so what’s the point?
No one could touch the home cooking of an Italian woman. French women, they are very intelligent, very sexy – but they don’t like to cook.
I can speak English, Portuguese, and a bit of Spanish, or Sportugal. It’s a mix of Portuguese and Spanish. I understand French and Italian, but I can’t speak them.
Ask anyone in the game: if you want a player from France or a French player, 99 per cent of the time, you will have to deal with Willie McKay or someone like him. If you want to get the job done, then you need the Willie McKays of this world.
I remember when Lindbergh arrived in Paris, I was one of the first persons to know about his landing, because as the French people know that I was born in St. Louis, thinking I would be very proud to announce it to the public, they gave me the news first. I was then starring in the ‘Folies Bergere.’
My father is Swedish and my mother is French.
It has since been agreed that speeches given in English will be translated into French and vice versa, and even into German and Italian when necessary. No doubt translations into Esperanto will also soon be in demand.
As the French say, there are three sexes – men, women, and clergymen.
I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls – for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour – and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.
I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
When I was 18, I left Dublin and moved to Paris. I didn’t speak French. I didn’t know anyone. I felt like a fish out of water.
British media supported Hillary. No problem with that. No interference. Nothing. French media supported Hillary. No problem with that. Some Russian media supported Trump: ‘Oh my God!’
Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for ‘The Perfumer’s Secret,’ I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
Of course there are fat French women. There are fat people everywhere.
‘Escargot’ is French for ‘fat crawling bag of phlegm’.
In money, and in life, you are very often your own worst enemy. You promise yourself you’re going to diet, then eat not one or two French fries but a whole plate. You decide to really commit to saving for retirement, only to wind up with a new pair of shoes in your closet.
To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
For me the French team belongs to the past.
When I was growing up, I never really ate vegetables. I was just a hot dog, hamburger, French fry person like most kids.
At the English Revolution, when William of Orange came to the throne, the introduction of French wines into the country was prohibited, and this gave a great impetus to the manufacture of cyder and care in the production of cyder of the best description.
I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.
When you’re a French woman and you have a lot of Latin blood, you can be very dramatic. It definitely makes your personal life exciting – and exhausting.
When we played Paris, the English punks would come over, and they got to know the French punks. There was some nice scenes in the back alleys.
England understands good Chinese, Japanese and Indian cuisine; in France, we just get French.
French are what they are without excusing themselves to be.
I like French films, Chabrol in particular. With him, you often get a skewed morality in which you sympathise with the person you shouldn’t.
I consider myself a ‘local’ actor in France. I started out in France, I went to drama school in France and the French film community was very welcoming to me when I was a young actress.
I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English.
My mother is French, my father is Texan.
I was much more interested by clothes when I was younger. I’m about being discreet. What they call the French touch, whatever that means. Low profile and somehow elegant without being flashy.
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.
When I first came to New York I was a dancer, and a French record label offered me a recording contract and I had to go to Paris to do it. So I went there and that’s how I really got into the music business. But I didn’t like what I was doing when I got there, so I left, and I never did a record there.
Situationism is a ludicrous proposition. It’s ill-formed and it’s perfectly French. That Gallic disposition towards common sense. L’Anarchie!
As for the role of France and Germany: French politics is often more self-confident then German politics due to the catastrophe in the first half of the last century. If Berlin and Paris don’t agree, then it is difficult to make progress in Europe.
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.
I don’t speak English or French, but that doesn’t mean anything.
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.
When I got to France I realized I didn’t know very much about food at all. I’d never had a real cake. I’d had those cakes from cake mixes or the ones that have a lot of baking powder in them. A really good French cake doesn’t have anything like that in it – it’s all egg power.
I’ve dreamed of having my French bulldog become a bestselling children’s heroine.
The cooking standards for Italian food are less demanding than for French. All you need are some fried mozzarella and five pastas, and you’re in business.
I especially love French, Italian and Japanese cuisines.
I went to a French immersion school, and French-Canadian improv is a big thing, and we had an improv team at school, and 12 of us would get up and make things up against other elementary schools. I’d always wanted to perform, and that was just another extension of it.
I’m not the healthiest eater, but I try to watch what I eat during the week. I kind of splurge on the weekends and eat french fries and pizza.
I love French style from the Thirties and Forties. French movie stars like Jean Gabin and Yves Montand had so much natural, effortless style.
I am and will remain a tax resident in France and in this regard I will, like all French people, fulfill my fiscal obligations.
I’m not an American actor. I’m a French actor. I’ll continue in France. If I could make another silent movie in America, I’d like to!
I remembered that my grandfather had spent his teenage years in Shanghai and that he went back after he finished medical school to work there in a hospital. So I went back into my family archives and was able to find out his exact address; it was a street that was in the French Concession.
