When you succeed, at a certain point, you want to challenge yourself. Otherwise, you become boring. You become a has-been. It’s not very interesting. I don’t want to be this guy who has only succeeded in France.
For France, anything is better than Hillary Clinton.
The Narrator of ‘A Sport and a Pastime’ is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls ‘the real France,’ Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.
France has lost the battle but she has not lost the war.
Most of my holidays are with wonderfully generous friends with houses in the country or the South of France.
I just went off for two months traveling around Europe on a motorcycle and pretty much turned my phone off. I did 5,000 miles with my dad. We went through Holland, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Italy… and then I did Spain and France by myself.
In America, sex is preached; in France, it is done.
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 think cinema is taken a bit more seriously in France.
At 17, I went away to Pau in the south of France for a few months to study domestic science – including cleaning windows with newspaper and water – while living with a Catholic family with 10 children.
The first play I did was a funny one called ‘The School for Wives’, by Moliere. We were wearing the ugliest wigs and the worst costumes you can ever imagine to try to recreate 17th-century France in Singapore. But I got my first real pay cheque from that. I was very happy taking that cheque to the bank.
I do not have the slightest bit of racism in me. I do not judge people with regards to the colour of their skin, their origin, or their religion. I defend them all, because I defend French people. And, of course, I defend the interests of France, the interests of French people.
I don’t think that France is responsible for the Vel d’Hiv.
In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.
German predominance is not all-encompassing. In foreign affairs and military matters, for instance, France and Britain still play a much bigger role. But across a large swathe of European policy, Germany has become much more than a first among equals.
Europe’s budget plans are better designed: countries from France to Greece are raising retirement ages; others, from Britain to Germany, have created new organisations and rules to encourage fiscal probity. But Europe risks overkill.
You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s old Europe.
If you think back to the days of Phil Anderson, when there were very few Australians to now when you have a Tour de France winner in Cadel Evans, a professional team in GreenEDGE, and classics winners in Stuart O’Grady and Matt Goss – the sport is bigger and bigger in Australia.
France is a place where the money falls apart in your hands but you can’t tear the toilet paper.
That period afterwards, just hating being the winner of the Tour de France, hating cycling, hating the media for asking me questions about Lance Armstrong.
The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators – I don’t know whether that’s a coincidence, or if there’s something to be learned from it.
I had to inspect all fighter units in Russia, Africa, Sicily, France, and Norway. I had to be everywhere.
I consider that France and the Republic were in London during the occupation and that the Vichy regime was not France.
What Marie Antoinette was to eighteenth-century France, Mary Pickford is to twentieth-century America.
I’m the most Colombian of the Colombians, even though I’ve lived 47 years outside of Colombia. I’ve lived 13 years in New York, and I never did a painting about New York. I’ve lived in France more than 30 years, and I’ve never painted Paris.
I am working as public relations director for the Tour de France and maintaining my farm.
I just did in my early twenties what most did when they were teenagers, being free and exploring and making mistakes, but I did it in France. I did it privately.
Cavani has been a historical figure for PSG. He’s scored so many goals. He’s a winner; he’s a leader. He’s very much respected in France as a player but also as a man because of his values.
I’ve never quite worked out how to do holidays. I’ve got a house in France which I suppose is a kind of holiday house. But it’s really only so I can go on drawing when I get there. I’m never far away from the feeling that I want to be getting on with something.
If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France, and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold.
I taught a master class in film in France, and that was a great experience because I got a chance to study the French film culture and the French film history, so to add… just to expand myself just personally and professionally was really helpful.
We have the sort of beautiful older woman here in Paris. People like Loulou de la Falaise and Betty Catroux, all these beautiful looking women over 60… So there is culture here in France that even if you are older, you can stay beautiful.
Islamist terrorism has declared war against us, against France, Europe, the entire world.
One must be aesthetically long-termist in selecting a man – it’s like purchasing a farmhouse in the south of France. Sure, it’s beautiful to look at, but will the roof stay on?
France is the only place where you can make love in the afternoon without people hammering on your door.
I backpacked through France and Italy in my teens, and then I was at Cannes with the first movie I did in ’84.
I find the stuff that is exciting to me are the films coming out of Taiwan and Iran and France. So I have the feeling I’m not making the films that American distributors want to make.
I have worked with this red all over the world – in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia – a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.
I always had a lot of fun in America, with much more freedom than if I had tried to cook in France. I wouldn’t have the same motivation or inspiration, and I wouldn’t have cooked for the same kind of people in France, so it wouldn’t have given me this edge I had in America.
In France they spend six months training policemen, then they give them a gun and put them on the streets, and I don’t know that that’s enough. The film’s not against the police – although I think that if someone wants to be a cop there’s got to be a problem.
Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.
Socialist ideology is making France go to pot, and the French language with it.
I chose PSG because it’s the biggest club in France and, for a young guy like me, a chance I couldn’t turn down.
I knew it to be very doubtful whether the Cabinet, Parliament, and the country would take this view on the outbreak of war, and through the whole of this week I had in view the probable contingency that we should not decide at the critical moment to support France.
When something favors France, I say so. When it doesn’t, I say so, too.
I want to specify that I pay my own taxes in France, for all my income.
When I did win the Tour, I felt I was feted more in the U.K. for being an Olympic gold medallist… Then I come back to Europe to race, and they’re not interested in the Olympic gold; it’s about being the winner of the Tour de France – here he is.
As a kid, I wanted to be part of the Lost Generation who came to France.
From my own country of France, I commit to pursuing the path of liberty – to be a free people.
France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.
We talked with PSG, but quickly, I knew that it wasn’t where I wanted to go. In France, for me, it was only Lyon. PSG could have enabled me to make progress because they have great players, but I wanted to experience another league.
All the evils of France have been produced less by the perversity of the wicked and the violence of fools than by the hesitation of the weak, the compromises of conscience, and the tardiness of patriotism. Let every deputy, every Frenchman show what he feels, what he thinks, and we are saved!
My goal is to put France back on its feet. I have to put this country back on its feet.
Me and my sister made up a game called ‘Milky Cow’. We were on holiday in France when I was 12, and there was a kid who had bovine features, and every time we went past her, we’d say, ‘There’s Milky Cow’.
WhatsApp provides phone-number-based messaging, and people asked, ‘Isn’t that what SMS is?’ Yes, but SMS is expensive, antiquated, and what WhatsApp did was modernize and level that playing field. For example, in Europe, if France wants to talk to Belgium, it’s extraordinary costly because of border and telecom charges.
