An American In Paris Quotes

#1. People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.

David Sedaris

#2. There was no experience, I thought, quite as wonderful as being an American in Paris.

Ann Mah

#3. In Paris, I met a young American person who immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that had directed my forces. Throughout my career as an artist, I refer to this person by the word 'Woman.'

Gaston Lachaise

#4. The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older - intelligence and good manners.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#5. I was a 'runaway girl' from France who married an American and moved to New York City. I'm not sure I would have continued as an artist had I remained in Paris because of the family setup.

Louise Bourgeois

#6. You will be my souvenir in American summer,
when all I can think about are Parisian springs.

Lori Jenessa Nelson

#7. That name was a sadistic play on the Underground Railroad that smuggled American slaves north. The old Nazis set up their own version and used it mainly to move their people. They called it Die Spinne.

John Pearce

#8. Paris? People always say Paris is the shit. "Yes, I've never understood the American obsession with that city. The food is actually quite terrible on the whole, and the people can be rather awful if you don't speak the language.

Tommy Wallach

#9. I didn't go to Paris until I was a grown-up in 1965. And when I went to Paris, it was the Paris I knew only from American movies.

Woody Allen

#10. Coming [to Paris] has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

#11. Elizabeth Blackwell, "with a very slender purse and few introductions of any value," found herself in the "unknown world" of Paris. What made her situation different from that of other American visitors was her profession. She was a doctor - the first American woman to have become a doctor.

David McCullough

#12. At one time, you could sit on the Rue de la Paix in Paris or at the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv or in Medina and you could see a person come in, black, white, it didn't matter. You said, 'That's an American' because there's a readiness to smile and to talk to people.

Maya Angelou

#13. Far from being dominated by ideas from Paris and New York, Latin American artists were often the innovators. They were doing drip paintings in advance of Pollock, creating language art before the American conceptualists, and fashioning shaped canvases decades before Kelly or Stella.

Mari Carmen Ramirez

#14. 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

#15. DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.

Ambrose Bierce

#16. The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.

Ernest Gellner

#17. Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#18. To accuse the American male of not bathing in Paris is merely to flatter him.

Elaine Dundy

#19. 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

#20. 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