Each country has a soul, and France's soul is equality.
I was lucky to live 10 years in France, so I learned how to eat and drink there.
In the 1970s, British food was beginning to get good, whereas in France it was just starting its long, sad decline. My most memorable meals, however, have been in Italy.
Thanks to the Tour de France, riding the Champs-Elysees has a great cycling history.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
I always loved Japanese movies. And they had an enormous impact in France - the Nouvelle Vague took so much from them. It taught us how the camera was placed in the centre of the action.
Being and working in America, it's very important to work hard, work smart and work in a certain way. France and Europe has, with the tradition and culture, it's slow-moving and it's not always good.
The government itself is running exactly like the Sopranos and they sit back and they make deals. And they say okay, 'I'm going do this: France, you're getting the pipelines.'
The strategy we must follow is to defend the special relationship between Great Britain and Europe and, more specifically, between Europe and France.
I don't think Obama's a socialist or evil, I just think he's wrong and I disagree with him, he's a leftist, that's what they are in France and in Great Britain and in Canada.
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 was born near Bucharest, but my parents came to France a year later. We moved back to Romania when I was thirteen, and my world was shattered. I hated Bucharest, its society, and its mores - its anti-Semitism for example.
I am working as public relations director for the Tour de France and maintaining my farm.
I'm pretty good with languages. I know a bit of French and actually want to live in France some day so that I can get fluent. I think it'd be tragic to go through life only knowing one language.
It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.
Like the Devil, the Norway lobster is known by a variety of different names: cigala in Spain, langoustine in France, Dublin Bay Prawn in Ireland. And in Italy, as well as the U.K., scampi.
When I arrived in France, I cried every day. Not because I was in France - I could have been anywhere - but because I was so far, far away from my parents. I missed them so much.
Women take great care of themselves in France. It's a culture dedicated to making women beautiful and to manners.
Honestly, the dangerous situation in which Jews in France live is such that those who walk with a kippa are in any case a minority, because they are afraid.
I'm definitely drawn to stories of just regular folks, just generally in some kind of horrific situation. I keep saying I want to do a love story in the south of France with a boy and girl and some wine. Then I always end up in an oil rig with four hundred guys or on a mountain with guys shooting at each other.
When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.
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.
I defy anyone - and I have said this to the Germans - to build a solid, articulated, and viable Europe without France's consent.
We find ourselves in a difficult situation in Europe. There's a crisis, weak growth, unemployment... my duty is to ensure that by the end of my mandate France is in a better state than it was at the beginning.
Only in a popular war against France... do I see a misfortune.
Every sentence spoken by Napoleon, and every line of his writing, deserves reading, as it is the sense of France.
Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he has actually done more than any American President for Africa. But it's empirically so.
For us, sons of France, political sentiment is a passion; while, for the Englishmen, politics are a question of business.
In France, that let down the barriers more than a hundred years ago, the feeling of antipathy is still strong enough to sustain an anti-Jewish political party.
France now has a new president and he must be respected. I assume full responsibility for this defeat.
Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways.
Quality of life is very important in France. I have many friends who turned down promotions and more money because it would affect their quality of life as a couple or a mother.
Have we so soon forgotten those four years of terrible carnage, the greatest war of all time; forgotten the millions of men who gave their lives, who made the supreme sacrifice and who today, beneath the soil of France and Belgium, sleep the eternal sleep?
I have contacts with the Tour de France which keep me close to cycling.
I am just like 99% of my friends in France, who say on their resume they can speak fluent English. In reality, they can't even count up to three.
The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.