Paris In French Quotes & Sayings

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. — Mark Twain

What happens in Paris stays in Paris, and all that. Just sayin'. — Kitty French

In Paris, I found myself surrounded by Germans; they were all over the place. They played music, and people would go and listen to them! All along rue de Rivoli, as far as you could see from place de la Concorde, there were enormous swastika banners five or six floors high. I just thought, This is impossible.
Imagine that someone comes into your home - someone you don't like - he settles down, gives orders: "Here we are, we're at home now; you must obey." To me that was unbearable. — Pearl Witherington Cornioley

When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics. — Ina Garten

The world-traveler must, on the one hand, be ready (and actually seek) to visit a tribe in the Solomon Islands or stay with Tibetan nomads; on the other hand, he has to be prepared, when it is required, to wear his suit to attend a classical music concert in a big metropolis. Just as an important part of exploring Brazil is to visit its shantytowns, it is an indispensable part of understanding the French culture to eat at a gourmet restaurant in Paris. — Nicos Hadjicostis

life, can become the truth of your life. He imagined them in Paris trying to talk to each other. She'd give small lectures on the country's innovative health care system; he'd give similar disquisitions on French jurisprudence. That would get them through one day, maybe two. Then they'd start making small talk about whatever was in front of them at that moment: the charming Parisian streets, the weather, the waiters, the daylight that clung on until well past ten. Museums would be a good choice because of the enforced silence. But then they'd be at a restaurant looking at menus and she'd say what looked good and he'd say what looked good and they'd stare at the plates of other diners and point out those that also looked good and express how they were perhaps changing their mind about what they intended to — Nathan Hill

Richard had met Jessica in France, on a weekend trip to Paris two years earlier; had in fact discovered her in the Louvre, trying to find the group of his office friends who had organized the trip. Staring up at an immense sculpture, he had stepped backwards into Jessica, who was admiring an extremely large and historically important diamond. He tried to apologize to her in French, which he did not speak, gave up, and began to apologize in English, then tried to apologize in French for having to apologize in English, until he noticed that Jessica was about as English as it was possible for any one person to be. — Neil Gaiman

Paris was all so ... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French! — David Nicholls

Ten cooks' shops! ... and all within three minutes' driving! one would think that all the cooks in the world ... had said - Come, let us all go live at Paris: the French love good eating - they are all gourmands - we shall rank high. — Laurence Sterne

Whoever would have guessed that in the land of cheap sausages and mashed potatoes there could be such a change which would actually bring the French from Paris every weekend to invade Britain en masse to eat great food and drink great wine. — Robin Leach

The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine. — Honore De Balzac

When I was living in Paris in the '80s, I used to go out with an American model who couldn't speak French. But suddenly everyone could speak English because he was so cute. — Edmund White

In Paris and later in Marseille, I was surrounded by some of the best food in the world, and I had an enthusiastic audience in my husband, so it seemed only logical that I should learn how to cook 'la cuisine bourgeoise' - good, traditional French home cooking. — Julia Child

ominous murmur ran through the legion of onlookers, who had heretofore maintained an uncharacteristic silence. Their resentment was palpable. Five days later Coligny was assassinated, and the streets of Paris ran with blood as the entire Huguenot wedding party was hunted down and slaughtered in one of the most infamous episodes in French history, known today as the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre. But this horrific mass murder, which claimed more than five thousand martyrs over the course of a week, was no spontaneous bloodletting. Rather, it was the denouement of a carefully constructed plot that utilized the unsuspecting Margot as both victim and bait to lure Coligny and his faction to their doom, an intrigue planned, instigated, and executed by the one individual in France powerful enough — Nancy Goldstone

My smell stays with you? I ruined you ... for what?"
"Your smell keeps me going all the time. I'm in a clutch game or at practice and it's full count? Your cloves and vanilla scent calms me down. I spray it on the front of my uniform and rub my right hand across like this." I demonstrate by rubbing my chest and she watches me in fascination like a starstruck teenager watches a rockstar play his bass. "I went to three different stores before I found the exact scent. Expensive. French perfume. Chamade by Guerlain."
She nods looking fascinated or charmed by me at least for a few seconds. "I got it in Paris when I was there a few years ago. I love it."
"I do too. So yes, you ruined me. For anyone else."
She's smiling but then it slowly disappears like a countdown does as it goes from ten to zero. "What are you doing to me, Elvis?" she asks, looking troubled. — Katherine Owen

Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousands murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion. — Timothy Snyder

I get invited to do panels with other Brooklyn writers to discuss what it's like to be a writer in Brooklyn. I expect it's like writing in Manhattan, but there aren't as many tourists walking very slowly in front of you when you step out for coffee. It's like writing in Paris, but there are fewer people speaking French. — Colson Whitehead

The murders in Paris are sickening, we stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press. — David Cameron

Despite Langdon's six-foot frame and athletic build, Anderson saw none of the cold, hardened edge he expected from a man famous for surviving an explosion at the Vatican and a manhunt in Paris. This guy eluded the French police ... in loafers? He looked more like someone Anderson would expect to find hearthside in some Ivy League library reading Dostoyevsky. — Dan Brown

It seemed that in Paris you could discuss classic literature or architecture or great music with everyone from the garbage collector to the mayor. — Julia Child

I was living in Paris for, like, a year and a half, and I couldn't speak French, so it was just hard to get a baguette or a pastry or whatever. All the stores close at 6 o'clock, and they're not very into hospitality, so it's not a convenient city. It's so pretty, though, but I was raised in Tokyo, so it was hard to understand. — Tao Okamoto

You're going to be a famous artist." His voice is deep velvet - soothing and sure. "You'll live in one of those artsy, upscale apartments in Paris with your rich husband. Oh, who just happens to be a world-renowned exterminator. How's that for a twist of fate? You won't even have to catch your own bugs anymore. That'll give you more time to spend with your five brilliant kids. And I'll come visit every summer. Show up on the doorstep with a bottle of Texas BBQ sauce and a French baguette. I'll be weird Uncle Jeb. — A.G. Howard

I lived in Italy for two months when I was in college. And I traveled to Paris. I traveled to Egypt. I traveled to Spain. I just would travel a lot. I remember going to Paris and saying, speaking French, 'I would like some chicken and some fries.' And just the chicken and fries was, oh my gosh, just so amazing. I became intrigued and inspired. — Tia Mowry

So we came to the Ritz hotel and the Ritz Hotel was divine. Because when a girl can sit in a delightful bar and have delicious champagne cocktails and look at all the important French people in Paris, I think it is divine. — Anita Loos

In Paris you're always surrounded by French people. — David Sedaris

In Paris, it's common to acknowledge someone attractive. The French don't avert their gaze like other cultures do. Haven't you noticed? — Stephanie Perkins

When Picasso painted in Paris, was he a Spanish or a French painter? It does not matter, he was Picasso, whatever the influences surrounding him. He simply chose Paris because it was the ideal place for him to sell his creation. — Jean-Jacques Annaud

When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make. — James Weldon Johnson

In each restaurant, I develop a different culinary sensibility. In Paris, I'm more classic, because that's what customers like. In Monaco, it's classic Mediterranean haute cuisine. In London, it's a contemporary French restaurant that I've developed with a U.K. influence and my French know-how. — Alain Ducasse

The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French. — Cecilia Bartoli

During the election people from visible minorities stood as candidates on both the left and the right. And only one African woman was elected in a very left-wing constituency in Paris. The French don't seem to be ready to elect people from a visible minority. So maybe this society is not ready to have a woman from a foreign background in this important post. That really surprised us, because we thought we had evolved. — Patrick Gaubert

I returned to London in the spring of 1926 for the General Strike. It was the topic of Paris. The French, exultant as always at the discomfiture of their former friends, and transposing into their own precise terms our mistier notions from across the Channel, foretold revolution and civil — Evelyn Waugh

I have been in Paris for almost a week and I have not heard anyone say calories, or cholesterol, or even arterial plaque. The French do not season their food with regret. — Mary-Lou Weisman

I would love to live in Paris and speak French. That would make me feel glamorous! — Amanda Seyfried

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. — Charlotte Rampling

but the officers danced assiduously, especially one of them who had spent six weeks in Paris, where he had mastered various daring interjections of the kind of - 'zut,' 'Ah, fichtr-re,' 'pst, pst, mon bibi,' and such. He pronounced them to perfection with genuine Parisian chic, and at the same time he said 'si j'aurais' for 'si j'avais,' 'absolument' in the sense of 'absolutely,' expressed himself, in fact, in that Great Russo-French jargon which the French ridicule so when they have no reason for assuring us that we speak French like angels, 'comme des anges. — Ivan Turgenev

Kilmartin wrote a highly amusing and illuminating account of his experience as a Proust revisionist, which appeared in the first issue of Ben Sonnenberg's quarterly Grand Street in the autumn of 1981. The essay opened with a kind of encouragement: 'There used to be a story that discerning Frenchmen preferred to read Marcel Proust in English on the grounds that the prose of A la recherche du temps perdu was deeply un-French and heavily influenced by English writers such as Ruskin.' I cling to this even though Kilmartin thought it to be ridiculous Parisian snobbery; I shall never be able to read Proust in French, and one's opportunities for outfacing Gallic self-regard are relatively scarce. — Christopher Hitchens

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. — Abdellah Taia

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. — Joe Strummer

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 keep the party going. — Edmund White

When I moved to Paris at 16, I held a dinner party in my first apartment and served only red wine, French fries, and mashed potatoes. Unable to cook, I relied on people taking me out. — Jerry Hall

This was a different form of French resistance in Paris on this day, all of these people coming together and sending out pictures like this to the world about the world we still want this to be, instead of the one that terrorists want, and that means all terrorists, the world where we live in constant fear. — Kimberley Strassel

When I was in college at the University of Pennsylvania, where I studied international relations and French, I studied abroad in Paris for a semester. I think when you're there, you can't help but be immersed in fashion because it's such a part of the city. — Stacey Bendet

ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished. — Mark Kurlansky

I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style. — Andre Leon Talley

I've no desire to hang around with a bunch of upper-class delinquents, do twenty minutes' work and then spend the rest of the day loafing about in Paris drinking gallons of champagne and having dozens of moist, pink, highly experienced French peasant girls galloping up and down my - hang on ... — Rowan Atkinson

Generally speaking, I'd say we're in much the same position here as the Germans occupying Paris. From what I hear, they're also rather sad that the French don't wholeheartedly welcome them as guests even though they've left their tanks outside the city and are behaving quite well in other respects. It's a curious fact that floggers, when they lay the whip aside for ten minutes, always expect their victims to love them at once. — Alex Capus

When the sommelier Enrico Bernardo moved to Paris from Italy nearly two decades ago, the world of French gastronomy brutally rejected him. No matter that he had won the competition for best sommelier in Italy; when he asked 30 restaurateurs for work in their wine cellars, all turned him down. — Elaine Sciolino

Remember this: no matter how politely or distinctly you ask a Parisian a question he will persist in answering you in French. — Fran Lebowitz

After the French Revolution, the world money power shifted from Paris to London. For three generations, the British maintained an old-fashioned colonial empire, as well as a modern empire based on London's primacy in the money markets. — Gore Vidal

They tell a story, probably not true, about a cap trooper who was sight-seeing in Paris. He visited Les Invalides, looked down at Napoleon's coffin, and said to a French guard there: "Who's he?"
The Frenchman was properly scandalized. "Monsieur does not know? This is the tomb of Napoleon! Napoleon Bonaparte! The greatest soldier who ever lived!"
The cap trooper thought about it. Then he asked, "So? Where were his drops? — Robert A. Heinlein

THE original Alexandre Dumas was born in 1762, the son of "Antoine Alexandre de l'Isle," in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. Antoine was a nobleman in hiding from his family and from the law, and he fathered the boy with a black slave. Later Antoine would discard his alias and reclaim his real name and title - Alexandre Antoine Davy, the Marquis de la Pailleterie - and bring his black son across the ocean to live in pomp and luxury near Paris. — Tom Reiss

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.' — Josephine Baker

Beautiful features, always immaculately dressed, the kind of woman that makes a great impression. Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women's colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. They then devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools. As he sat there, Tsukuru pondered the kind of lives they led. — Haruki Murakami

It was a fine fall morning in Paris, crisp and clear, and Benji was quite full of himself, cavorting near the fountain, playing with the children who had inexplicably materialized out of nowhere at the first whiff of a movie star. Their faces radiated and they took turns gently stroking his head. Those Benji chose to favor with a big sloppy lick exploded with laughter, and one young girl ran to her mother, screeching in French that she would never wash her face again. — Joe Camp

The northern end of the Maginot Line was many kilometers away. The bulk of the French forces were positioned along that line, waiting for a frontal German attack that Luc now realized would never come. The Nazis had achieved what the generals and politicians in Paris said was impossible. They had carefully navigated their way through the Ardennes. They had used the trees as cover to keep French reconnaissance planes from spotting them. And now they were launching a devilishly clever sneak attack. They were outflanking the French forces. They were about to skirt right around them and attack them from behind. — Joel C. Rosenberg

The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. — Mark Kurlansky

A scientist places an ad in a Paris newspaper offering a free horoscope. He receives about 150 replies, each, as requested, detailing a place and time of birth. Every respondent is then sent the identical horoscope, along with a questionnaire asking how accurate the horoscope had been. Ninety-four per cent of the respondents (and 90 per cent of their families and friends) reply that they were at least recognizable in the horoscope. However, the horoscope was drawn up for a French serial killer. If an astrologer can get this far without even meeting his subjects, think how well someone sensitive to human nuances and not overly scrupulous might do. — Carl Sagan

You asked me in Paris how many
women I'd loved. I said one. I should
have said two." He cupped her cheek,
his thumb rubbing over her bottom lip.
"As a child I loved my mother, and as a
man I love you. — Kitty French

In Paris in 1964 was the first time I ever heard Dylan at all. Paul got the record (The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) from a French DJ. For three weeks in Paris we didn't stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan. — John Lennon

I'd always been extremely fascinated by the French Nuit Blanche, which is a weekend that they have in Paris where they keep all the museums open until dawn. You can go and hang out in Versailles in the middle of the night and watch the sun come up. — Anna Wintour

A year or two after emigrating, she happened to be in Paris on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of her country. A protest march had been scheduled, and she felt driven to take part. Fists raised high, the young Frenchmen shouted out slogans condemning Soviet imperialism. She liked the slogans, but to her surprise she found herself unable to shout along with them. She lasted only a few minutes in the parade.
When she told her French friends about it, they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand. Embarrassed, she changed the subject. — Milan Kundera

They left me. My parents actually left me! IN FRANCE! — Stephanie Perkins

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret. — Fred Allen

When I first went to Paris in 1965, I fell in love with the small, family-owned restaurants that existed everywhere then, as well as the markets and the French obsession with buying fresh food, often twice a day. — Alice Waters

It is a proof of the divergence of the tendencies of the socialist and the bourgeois pictures of history - and from now on there will be two distinct historical cultures running side by side without ever really fusing - that people who have been brought up on the conventional version of history and know all about the Robespierrist Terror during the Great French Revolution, should find it an unfamiliar fact that the Terror of the government of Thiers executed, imprisoned or exiled more people - the number has been estimated at a hundred thousand - in that one week of the suppression of the [Paris] Commune [of 1871] than the revolutionary Terror of Robespierre had done in three years. — Edmund Wilson

In a few days, I will have them all guillotined in Paris. — Jean-Paul Marat

Old St Petersburg remains a beautiful stage set but to the Russians it is not what Rome is to the Italians or Paris to the French. The decisions are made in the Kremlin. The city of Peter remains a museum, open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. — Joseph Wechsberg

Strangely, producing "Parisienne" was very long and difficult because the people who mainly finance films didn't understand the idea of a young foreign girl having a good time in Paris. They wanted to see her suffering and poor, and definitely not falling in love with three French men! — Danielle Arbid

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. — Miley Cyrus

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. — Olga Kurylenko

He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little Poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. — John Steinbeck

In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page. — Hilary Mantel

Tell your papa I'll call upon him soon. Mr. Jefferson is still very much needed here in Paris, where his revolution remains undone. In my study, I have a copy of his Declaration of Independence in half a frame. The other half of the frame is empty. One day, with his help, it will house a Declaration of French Rights and they'll stand side by side, like proud brothers. Like France and America. Like your father and me." Ordinarily, — Stephanie Dray

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. — Jean-Pierre Jeunet

If Senator Rubio were doing his job and in Congress more, he might know that the program [phone records of a potential terrorist cause] continues. It's been ongoing for the last six months. So the Paris tragedy, this tragedy happened while we were still doing bulk collection, all bulk collection. Also in France, they have a program a thousand-fold more invasive, collecting all of the data of all of the French. — Rand Paul

French Kiss - A Love Letter to Paris, is a tribute to many of the wonderful moments of romance, beauty, hope, and love that I have witnessed and been inspired by in Paris, my adopted home, over the past 40 years. I believe that photography is ultimately about sharing. I am excited to share, with the world, these moments of the heart that have touched my own, in this most beautiful city, Paris — Peter Turnley

I was picked up on a London street by a model agent. She took me to her office and then sent me to Paris to work in shows. It was supposed to be two weeks, but I ended up living there with my Zimbabwean boyfriend. I made enough money modeling and acting in French movies to buy a nice flat. — Saffron Burrows

Parisians were not easy to engage in conversation. Perhaps that was why the Resistance had been so successful. — Sara Sheridan

I was born in Paris, and my mother was a French teacher, but then I rebelled against my upbringing and studied Spanish in school. So now I just speak bad French and bad Spanish. — Lydia Leonard

I want to be adopted by the French. I want to go to live in Paris. — Asia Argento

I just dreamed about living in Paris and being French. I always loved the visual arts, film and theatre, and I hoped to be involved in creating beautiful products and images. — Maureen Chiquet

A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you. — Hilary Mantel

When I went to Paris, I had a lot of ideas about it that were formed in the sort of ether that flows about if you watch too many recent Woody Allen movies or took French classes as a kid. I was certainly full of those. — Rosecrans Baldwin

When you live in Paris, and fashion is such a point of pride for the French, it's always around and you're very much exposed to it from an early age. It was always something I knew about and really liked. — Joseph Altuzarra

Given the choice between four perfectly acceptable movies, they invariably opt for a walk through the Picasso museum or a tour of the cathedral, saying, "I didn't come all the way to Paris so I can sit in the dark." They make it sound so bad. "Yes," I say, "but this is the French dark. It's ... darker than the dark we have back home. — David Sedaris

After multiple trips to Paris and being accused of participating in 'heinous' activities in regard to the state, I found my Romanian nationality revoked by 'presidential decree' in 1975. Because I hadn't asked for political asylum like everyone else, I had to live and travel with the infamous Nansen Passport from then on. This wasn't easy ... I finally obtained my French citizenship in 1983. — Dumitru Tepeneag

I'm 50% Asian actually, so yes I was born in Paris but I feel more international than French so I can't talk about French women. — Berenice Marlohe

She's certain that I intend to lure Lilly into the debauched harem that I maintain in the opium dens of Paris." He turned her toward the lane. "Be so good as to thwart me from this evil scheme. You can begin by distracting me with a walk to the post office."
She smiled, though it was slightly watery. "I see that it's my Christian duty, when you put it so. I only hope I may not succumb to your wicked plot myself."
"Oh, I have far more sinister plans for you. I mean to entice you to a dish of tea in the public parlor at the Antlers. I will certainly set a chair for you, and possibly I may even speak French. — Laura Kinsale

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. — Wolfgang Schauble

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it's complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they've had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language. — Mark Zero

Nobody went to bed at seven in Paris, even French children. Les enfants stayed up late at night, he had heard, eating with the adults, sipping red wine, and discussing the latest books and films. — Alexander McCall Smith

Henri the painter was not French and his name was not Henri. Also he was not really a painter. Henri has so steeped himself in stories of the Left Bank in Paris that he lived there although he had never been there. — John Steinbeck

One story that circulated about (U.S. Minister to Russia Charles S.) Todd concerned his conversation with a lady-in-waiting at an Imperial reception in the Winter Palace. In his bad French with a Kentucky accent, he mispronounced the word for year, so that an explanation of his travels came out: "I was an ass in Paris, part of an ass in London, almost an ass in Germany, and I am two asses here." To which the lady reportedly responded, "And you will be an ass wherever you go. — Norman E. Saul

I love magazines. I always read 'Time,' 'Newsweek' and 'The Economist.' When I get my hair cut, French 'Vogue,' French 'Elle,' 'Paris Match' - I read them all in 10 minutes. — Janine Di Giovanni

You're the last line of defense. When you're dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?'
'That's not fair. The French didn't fight,' Tatiana said, wanting to be anywhere right now but standing in front of men loading artwork from the Hermitage onto armored trucks.
'They didn't fight, Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose
'
'The art will be saved.'
'Yes! The art will be saved,' Alexander said emotionally. 'And another artist will paint a glorious picture, immortalizing you, with a club in your raised hand, swinging to hit the German tank as it's about to crush you, all against the backdrop of the statue of Peter the Great atop his bronze horse. And that picture will hang in the Hermitage, and at the start of the next war the curator will once again stand on the street, crying over his vanishing crates. — Paullina Simons

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'. — Saul Bellow

English is really free for me; there's no limits to the music and the imagination. And French, it's just I live in Paris, and it's really a poetic language where you can really play with words. — Yael Naim

My deep relations with fashion started in Paris in 1980s, when I was appointed head of The Fashion History course at French Esmod fashion school, the biggest and the best in those years in Paris. — Alexander Vassiliev

"Parisienne" is about how you forge a life in a new place when you are 18. And it's about a Lebanese girl who discovers Paris and the French in the 90s, and through these encounters, discovers herself. — Danielle Arbid