Top 100 Quotes About French People
#1. In France today, people no longer eat as much heavy food and fat as they did 15 or 20 years ago. These days, French cooking, through the influence of 'grande cuisine,' has become a bit lighter. And we are beginning to discover the original flavors of our produce.
Joel Robuchon
#2. 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.
Jacques Pepin
#3. I go to Saint Barth in the French West Indies for two weeks each year. That place is amazing. Amazing people, beautiful beaches, great wine, wonderful harbors ... It's incredibly romantic.
Brooke Burke
#4. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#5. If you are British, you soon get used to people not loving you. The Irish remind us of offenses from 100 years ago. Perhaps we should react to what the French did to us even longer ago.
Mick Jagger
#6. My dream is not Hollywood, but to perform my act in English to 30 people in a Soho comedy club, to show New Yorkers what they look like from the French point of view.
Gad Elmaleh
#7. Let me tell you how the French seduce you. They are the most bloody seductive people on Earth. They are charming, they are well-mannered and they praise and flatter you.
Anita Roddick
#8. I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Jim Harrison
#9. The French, than whom - it's a very than-whom people all round - none can be more vacuously orotund, are (the same ones) obligingly terse. On occasion.
Nicolas Freeling
#10. JJ informed me, when he dropped them off, that they are French bulldogs, which has led med to reassess my opinion of the French. They may know a lot about making wine and fries, but they don't know jacques-merde about making dogs.
Melissa DeCarlo
#11. People know that I have a great love for cinema. Not just for commercial cinema, but for the 'cinema d'auteur.' But to me, two of the great 'auteurs' are actually actors and they both happen to be French. One is Alain Delon and the other is Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Harvey Weinstein
#12. It's normal that people expect more from the French team,
Patrick Vieira
#13. In my town, and especially in my area, there were people from everywhere: Algerians, Senegalese, French people, Asians, all kinds of immigrants and natives, and everyone circulated.
Tahar Rahim
#14. Cannes is a little bit like French wine. There are certain years that people prefer over others.
Rob Lowe
#15. We're journeying constantly, but there is always a machine and books, and your body is always close to me and the look in your eyes never changes. People are saying we will be miserable, we will regret, but we are happy, we are laughing always, we are singing. We are talking Spanish and French and
Anais Nin
#16. This land, like so much of the French countryside, was a painting, but Mercier felt his heart touched with melancholy and realized, not for the first time, that beautiful places were hard on lonely people.
Alan Furst
#17. Those two wholesome defects of the French people, malice and curiosity, both of which are essential to its greatness.
Marthe Bibesco
#18. Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
Fiona McIntosh
#19. From the sea came a boat with some Israeli commando soldiers who took me by the commando boat to the yacht and put me on the yacht. In the yacht I asked people, who are you. And they said we are Israelis, French and British.
Mordechai Vanunu
#20. French people are Italian people in a bad mood.
Jean Cocteau
#21. Everyone understood [Charlie Hebdo], as people had understood for hundreds of years, knowing that Rabelaisian tradition of French satire, they knew how to read it. And they understood the kind of release from piety that it represented every week.
Scott Simon
#23. WHEAT, n. A cereal from which a tolerably good whisky can be made; ... also for bread. The French are said to eat more bread "per capita" of population than any other people, which is natural, for only they know how to make the stuff palatable.
Ambrose Bierce
#24. The beauty of being a woman, as the French say, "of a certain age", is that I can be invisible. Young people, both men and women, look right through me, unless I make the effort to be noticed.
Nanci Rathbun
#25. Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as legislature ... So people who go to bed to sleep Must count French premiers or sheep, And people who ought to arise from bed Yawn and go back to sleep instead.
Ogden Nash
#26. Did not manage to convince the French people that we were going in the right direction.
Alain Juppe
#27. 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
#28. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.
James Horner
#29. 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
#30. It's amazing how you meet people through other people. I knew a racecar driver, Stefan Johansson, who was very hot. He introduced me to Jean Todt. He introduced me to a French doctor. He introduced me to a French architect who redid the Louvre with I.M. Pei. He introduced me to Daniel Boulud.
James Rosenquist
#31. Young people need their own private places which mothers don't belong to, even if they want mother all around the edge of that.
Dawn French
#33. I had always felt that I was an observer, never a participant; that I was watching from behind a thick glass wall as people went about the business of living
and did it with such ease, with a skill that they took for granted and that I had never known.
Tana French
#34. The thing about old neighborhoods: people still mind each other's business.
Tana French
#35. I think in France, for example, we can say whatever we want about the French, but going out and dining is more about the intellectual moment to share with the people you dine with than trying to figure out what the chef did with that little piece of salmon or lobster and all that.
Daniel Boulud
#36. I was born in Lebanon and emigrated to the U.S. and went back. I'd been raised in a French school in Beirut. Lebanon is a peculiar place, so bicultural it goes along with you. There is a Western influence, an Eastern influence. Most people are fluctuating between those identities.
Ziad Doueiri
#37. I just love France, I love French people, I love the French language, I love French food. I love their mentality. I just feel like it's me. I'm very French.
Olga Kurylenko
#38. The only people who didn't like The Monkees were the French, and they don't even like themselves, so what's the point?
Davy Jones
#41. In college, I was a huge fan of 'Les Miserables.' I seem to remember that people who were into French literature preferred Hugo's poetry.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#42. As French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre noted sixty years ago, as soon as we imagine we're being watched, we start to notice how we're behaving, and we begin to imagine how other people might respond if they were watching.
Adam Alter
#43. What's the reality of being inside a zoo, for the animals and for the people who love and care for those animals? There's a lot of joy, and there's a lot of loss.
Thomas French
#44. Very much in my books people find not surrogate families because they are real families. We've got families that we're related to by blood but we've also got families that we acquire. And those too I think are pretty much part of my books.
Jackie French
#45. If only stupid people could have the mere intelligence to shut up while discussing serious matter, the world would go along so much better !
Laure Lacornette
#46. Nothing is as depressing as absolute logic. Look at the maze of French politics perpetrated by a logical people.
Rae Foley
#47. People say 'Why would you learn Dutch? Nobody speaks it. Why not French?' Even the Dutch say that to me! I say because I want to live here, I think it's only common courtesy that I speak the language.
Anthony Geary
#48. It never ceases to surprise me, the people I get to work with. I'm in a French film with Sandrine Bonnaire? I adore Sandrine Bonnaire. I'm doing a picture for Robert Redford? The Sundance Kid? I have to pinch myself sometimes.
Kevin Kline
#49. I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack
Tana French
#50. Of course I do know it is the French who are so wicked; but there are all these people who keep coming and going - the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Russians. Pray, are the Russians good now? It would be very shocking - treason no doubt - to put the wrong people in my prayers.
Patrick O'Brian
#51. At the end of the day, you got to learn from people that been through what you been through; they help you learn from your mistakes.
French Montana
#52. I don't know why people are surprised the French don't want to help us get Saddam out of Iraq. After all, France wouldn't help us get the Germans out of France.
Jay Leno
#53. In September 1968, Rush played for around 20 people at a small hall in a church basement. We played songs like 'Spoonful,' 'Fire' and 'Born Under a Bad Sign,' and got paid $10. Then we went to a nearby deli and ordered Cokes and French fries and started planning our future.
Alex Lifeson
#54. There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.
Christopher Hitchens
#55. Part of the French political class is realising that there is are large number of Muslim people coming from the ghettos who want to make themselves heard, politically, especially about foreign policy issues. Its electoral weight can bring back to the forefront the Palestinian issue.
Tariq Ramadan
#56. One of the French officers was horrified that at a dinner in Washington's tent, His Excellency served the meal not in a succession of courses like in civilization. Apparently Washington "gave, on the same plate, meat, vegetables, and salad." On the same plate? Were these Americans people or animals?
Sarah Vowell
#57. They seemed to be removed from her by more than just language. French people leading French lives. Why was it that anything you couldn't readily understand became mysterious and glamorous?
Kathleen Tessaro
#58. You know why the French don't want to bomb Saddam Hussein Because he hates America he loves mistresses and he wears a beret. He is French people.
Conan O'Brien
#59. When you win a big title like the French Open, it's tough. The emotion in doing this is really up and down. Afterwards, you feel a little bit lonely, a bit of depression mentally. Because it's so much stress and emotion, so many people around - and then it's completely empty.
Stanislas Wawrinka
#60. People rich enough to redecorate every 10 months are certainly careless with antique furniture. I found four 1760 French side chairs, tapestry seats intact. Claiming them proved easier than persuading any cabdriver to transport the things.
Allan Gurganus
#61. Plenty of people think the same thing. All of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically. Only teenagers think boring is bad. Adults, gown men and women who've been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God.
Tana French
#62. Despite history, despite English, despite the noteworthies, and a little bit also despite ourselves, alas!, the Quebecois people have stayed French. I had violently returned. This people had no need of directives to affirm its French pride in the face of the whole world
Pierre Bourgault
#63. If you call the day after, you're maybe a bit desperate because, since the first day is out of the question, the second day is really the first day, so you're calling on the first day. If they're going to call, people call on the third day.
Nicci French
#64. France is deeply upset to learn of the monstrous attacks that have just struck the United States ... In these terrible circumstances, all French people stand by the American people. We express our friendship and solidarity in this tragedy.
Jacques Chirac
#65. I don't like people who speak French in public places. This includes the French.
Ian Shoales
#66. A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.
John C. Calhoun
#67. You would save them. If you could."
"No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won't dispute it.
Hilary Mantel
#68. Some 1,300 years later, the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre metaphorically spat on the notion of communal bliss by declaring, "Hell is other people.
Eric Weiner
#69. These are fashionable people who call themselves philosophers.
Noam Chomsky
#70. there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's eighties),
Tana French
#71. I've never had help from anyone, ever. I've never had this great director who saw themselves in me, because I'm a French woman in Hollywood. Who could identify with me as a successful director in Hollywood? Nobody. And the few people who could have been mentors, instead they just stole my ideas.
Julie Delpy
#72. In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here.
Simon McBurney
#73. There are the two sides to a Frenchman, logic and fashion and that is the reason why French people are exciting and peaceful. Logic and fashion.
Gertrude Stein
#74. She wakes up all at once, all over, smooth as a cat. Probably there's cat in her ancestry someplace. Those old noble French families ... " "No telling, with the French. Inventive people.
Joanna Bourne
#75. The readership of Victorian novels, when they were published, was much less diverse. People were probably white, and had enough money to be literate. Very often, there are phrases in Italian, German and French that are left untranslated.
Eleanor Catton
#76. The English are very fond of being entertained, and ... they regard the French and the American people as destined by Heaven to amuse them.
M. E. W. Sherwood
#77. How can people say they don't eat eggplant when God loves the color and the French love the name? I don't under'stand.
Jeff Smith
#78. I'm not Catholic. I don't believe in God. But at the same time, I'm obsessed by the sacred, by spirituality. The question of redemption has been present well before Christianity, but as French people are a bit stupid, they see all that in religious terms.
Bruno Dumont
#79. Real French people don't bake! At least they don't bake anything complicated, finicky, tricky or unreliable.
Dorie Greenspan
#80. 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
#81. Sometimes, when you're close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can't.
Tana French
#82. If the elites listened, they would understand why French young people like me are joining our ranks.
Marion Marechal-Le Pen
#83. An Englishman was reflecting on the different words that people use for fish. 'Isn't it strange,' he said, 'that the French say le poisson, the Spanish say el pescado, and the English call it fish - which is what it is.'
Alexander McCall Smith
#84. People said - though this felt like a heresy - that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.
Hilary Mantel
#86. You cannot fight against it. There's a price you have to pay for fame, and people who don't want to pay that price can get in trouble. I accepted the idea of celebrity because of a French expression: 'You cannot have the butter and the money for the butter.'
Karl Lagerfeld
#87. I told people I was taking a gap year, but the truth was that I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life.
Tana French
#88. People need to learn to take everyone as they are.
Dawn French
#89. Life should be good - Life should be very, very good - and the only duty we have to the dead is to make it good for ourselves and other people.
Jackie French
#90. The French doctor - the French, they are a very logical race and make good doctors - says: "M'sieu, they have all been on the wrong track - ("Jane Brown's Body")
Cornell Woolrich
#91. I don't really think of most non-English as people, more or less indigenous squirrels that I fancy to kick around with my snakeskin French Persian Boots
Thom Yorke
#92. Trinidad's language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it's the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.
Monique Roffey
#93. I've often said the most difficult things I have to say to people through humour. I can very quickly put someone in their place with it. But we all walk away unscathed because there's been some funnies around it, and I'll usually make sure that it comes back at me.
Dawn French
#94. 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.
Nick Yapp
#95. 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
#96. The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won't be running away from it or hiding from it.
Nicolas Sarkozy
#97. I am and will remain a tax resident in France and in this regard I will, like all French people, fulfill my fiscal obligations.
Bernard Arnault
#98. I have no time for people who sigh about how quickly children grow up nowadays (my grandparents, after all, were working full-time by sixteen, which I think trumps any number of body piercings in the adulthood stakes),
Tana French
#99. I came from battling, knowing about the lyrics. All that's cool, but if you want people to love you, you have to talk to them about what they go through.
French Montana
#100. The people of the two nations [French and English] must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each other's wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race. It is God's own method of producing an entente cordiale, and no other plan is worth a farthing.
Richard Cobden
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