There’s an enormous propaganda machine in this world,' Peter said, 'that tries to make people think love — real, earthy, sweaty love — is wrong. But how in the hell they expect to propagate the race that way is beyond me.
May you hear my feeble voice! It will tell you that here below there is a heart full of the memory of you.
I spent the period reading the first novel assigned for English. And wow. If I hadn't realized I was in France yet, I do now. Because Like Water for Chocolate has sex in it. LOTS of sex.
Men may be the head of the house, but the women are the neck, and they can turn the head any way they want.
They have a very low rate for attempted murder and a high rate for successfully concluded murder. It seems that when a French person sets out to kill someone, they make a good job of it.
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 anothe...
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 19...
The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in...
In Paris, AIDS was dismissed as an American phobia until French people started dying; then everyone said, 'Well, you have to die some way or another.' If Americans were hysterical and pragmatic, the French were fatalistic: depressed but determined to...
I have defended the interests of France at the G8 in Washington; afterwards I was at Chicago to announce the withdrawal of French troops from Afghanistan; I have participated in two European summits, so I have fully respected the engagements I made t...
I think London, New York, Paris, Milan, any big city has its own fashion. I don't know why they make such a big thing of Paris. I think maybe it comes from French New Wave films portraying the French girl as very feminine.
My mother likes what I cook, but doesn't think it's French. My wife is Puerto Rican and Cuban, so I eat rice and beans. We have a place in Mexico, but people think I'm the quintessential French chef.
[first lines] Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle: Merry Christmas. What's your name, little boy? Little Boy: Eric. Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle: Uh-huh, Eric. What do you want for Christmas Eric? Hmmm?
Rita: Believe it or not, I studied nineteenth-century French poetry. Phil: La fille que j'aimera Sera comme bon vin Qui se bonifiera Un peux chaques matin Rita: You speak French? Phil: Oui.
Francesca Mondino: [in French; subtitled] Emanuelle, did you enjoy "Lucky Kids"? Shosanna Dreyfus: [in French] I rather liked Lillian Harvey. Joseph Goebbels: [suddenly in German] Lillian Harvey! Never mention that name in my presence!
Abe: [Joe has been teaching himself French] Why the fuck French? Joe: I'm going to France. Abe: You should go to China. Joe: I'm going to France. Abe: I'm from the future. You should go to China.
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 Mission...
I know of no other place that is so fascinating yet so frustrating, so aware of the world and its own place within it but at the same time utterly insular. A country touched by nostalgia, with a past so great - so marked by brilliance and achievement...
He who doesn't open his eyes when he buys must still open his purse to pay.
The stakes are high on every film now because there's the opening weekend. The first week is extremely crucial; increasingly, films are being judged in terms of opening day, opening weekend, then first week. People are going berserk promoting their f...
Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)
