Top 100 Quotes About The Paris
#1. Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine.
Charles Dickens
#2. Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.
John Pipkin
#3. I always dream of some great unexpected infidelity. But I have not yet been able to escape my bigamous state."
Milan Kundera, "The Paris Review" summer 1984 no. 92
Milan Kundera
#4. Having nothing to do, I am correcting the Paris edition of Bach; not only the engraver's mistakes, but also the mistakes hallowed by those who are supposed to understand Bach (I have no pretensions to understand better, but I do think that sometimes I can guess).
Frederic Chopin
#6. I was there less than a year before I was assigned to the Paris bureau. I spent two years there and, in fact, before I even went on the staff I was sent to Europe to do assignments which they wouldn't normally do for a young photographer just starting out.
Gordon Parks
#7. [The way I work] is like driving a car at night: you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
(The Paris Review, Winter 1986, No. 101)
E.L. Doctorow
#8. The late Mavis Gallant told the Paris Review that writing is like "a love affair: the beginning is the best part. I write every day. It is not a burden. It is the way I live.
Mavis Gallant
#9. The attacks on the Paris Metro in the 1990s were committed by members of the local Muslim community, immigrants from the Maghreb region of North Africa.
Otto Schily
#10. President Obama telling Americans not to panic in the wake of the Paris terror attacks.
Al Sharpton
#11. Well, let's say we acknowledged the School of French Painting - the Paris School of painting as the leading force and vitality of the time. I think that was understood and felt and experienced.
Lee Krasner
#12. In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I've never forgotten: Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay.
Gretchen Rubin
#13. Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.
William Kennedy
#14. I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.
Siri Hustvedt
#15. There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
[Interview, The Paris Review, Summer 1956]
Dorothy Parker
#16. There's evidence that one of the Paris attackers may have entered Europe posing as a refugee.
Audie Cornish
#17. The flowers seemed to brighten in the splash of the rain, and Magnus took a great, deep breath of the Paris air he loved so well.
As they drove off, a potato hit the side of his carriage.
Cassandra Clare
#18. The "gravity train" was devised in the seventeenth century by British scientist Robert Hooke, who presented the idea in a letter to Isaac Newton. The idea has been seriously presented a few times, such as to the Paris Academy of Sciences in the nineteenth century.
Stephen Baxter
#19. Overhead in the Paris sky
Two airplanes fought it out one day
And one of them was my whole youth
The other was my days to come
Guillaume Apollinaire
#20. I did grow up in France, and even though I didn't go to the school or dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, I absorbed similar ideas in my training. I understand the scale of a big company. I danced for one for almost 20 years.
Benjamin Millepied
#21. Wieners, punch, and spinning into barfing would later be referred to as the "Paris Hilton".
Tina Fey
#22. ... my books are derived from city images, and the city of my dreams or nightmares is Mexico City. (The Art of Fiction, No. 68. The Paris Review, No. 82, Winter 1981.)
Carlos Fuentes
#23. The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.
C.L.R. James
#24. They got into fact checking at the 'Paris Review,' and it was mortifying. There was a wrangle about Hemingway's lost stories that nearly killed me. It turns out he didn't lose those stories. They weren't stolen from the platform.
Padgett Powell
#25. The Paris attack was highly sophisticated, well-planned, very clever, took months in the making, very much like 9/11. And there is a 9/11-style attack coming to America.
Rand Paul
#26. MERCER USED TO PASS THE TIME, during his post-grad months of flipping burgers out on Route 17, by polishing his opinions on life and literature for that future date when they would grace the pages of The Paris Review.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#27. Now people don't know what it was in the Paris version, they put the skeleton at the end, not at the beginning. At least they've learn something!
John Hench
#28. [A]lways get to the dialogue as soon as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader off more than a big slab of prose at the start.
(Interview, The Paris Review, Issue 64, Winter 1975)
P.G. Wodehouse
#29. After university, I was working as a stylist in the Paris theatres when I had a flash of inspiration. I made necklaces from the bikinis designed for the cabaret performers of Folies Bergeres. I was so happy with them that it was only then that I sought out formal training in jewelry.
Paloma Picasso
#30. If the weather is too cold or rainy, I take shelter in the Regence Cafe, where I entertain myself by watching chess being played. Paris is the world center, and this cafe is the Paris centre for the finest skill at this game.
Denis Diderot
#31. I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.'
Harmony Korine
#32. However, President Obama's unwillingness to attend the Paris march is a personal failing on his part that I believe does damage to the pride and soul of the nation he leads.
Rick Ungar
#33. 'The Paris Review' was always the pinnacle: it was the place to be published. You were thrilled if you were published in 'The Paris Review,' and George Plimpton himself was practically mythical. He was a legendary figure.
James Salter
#34. By the time I got to the Paris Conservatoire I was very good at the scales and arpeggios.
James Galway
#35. The nice thing about publishing later in life is that you already know who you are. You don't have to hang out with the 'Paris Review' crowd to try to make yourself feel like a legitimate writer.
Hanya Yanagihara
#36. Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn't know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn't know he was a novelist either.
(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)
John Irving
#37. In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.
Pankaj Mishra
#38. 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
#39. Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Friedrich Engels
#40. In the winter of 1973, the American POWs held captive in Vietnam were released according to the terms of the Paris Peace Accords.
Annie Jacobsen
#41. Paris, viewed from the towers of Notre Dame in the cool dawn of a summer morning, is a delectable and a magnificent sight; and the Paris of that period must have been eminently so.
Victor Hugo
#42. I published my first poem in 'The Paris Review' in 1980.
Siri Hustvedt
#43. The Paris peace talks kept a roof over my head and food on the table and clothes on my back because if something was said going in or coming out, I had the rent for the month.
Ed Bradley
#44. An uninterrupted view of the Paris skyline was spread out before her, like a giant landscape painting rendered in shades of blue-grey, charcoal and purple-tinted umber; the dreamy palette of shifting shadows at twilight. The blue hour.
Kathleen Tessaro
#45. This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the 'Paris Review' and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play.
John Jeremiah Sullivan
#46. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the related Accra Agenda for Action, are useful policy instruments that set out the mutual responsibilities of donors and recipient countries.
Margaret Chan
#47. That bomb that took down that Russian airliner may have been the size of a soda can. And that bomb killed more people than all the Paris attackers combined. So this is still a grave threat.
Adam Schiff
#48. Chicago will forever be in my heart," she said. "It is the Paris of the Middle West.
Graham Moore
#49. The Cubist paintings in the Centre Pompidou in Paris were strange but amazing. The big fat magical cat said they made her eyes hurt.
Jim Shanahan
#50. I envy the people who go to Paris the first time
Marc Jacobs
#51. I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries.
Thomas Mallon
#52. 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
#54. The only real meaning in life can be found in a good man. And maybe Paris. Preferably the two together.
Marilyn Vos Savant
#55. Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow.
Barack Obama
#56. The dark outside world of Paris under German occupation exerted a strong containing pressure.
Gerard Debreu
#57. I had arrived years ago in Paris and just wanted to be famous, fast. When you're pretentious like that, and you think you've planned everything perfectly, it's then that everything goes in the opposite way.
Yael Naim
#58. 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
#59. The song Dakota was first written in Paris. I was doing a promo trip. It was snowing and the hotel room was really cold and boring and for some reason I just had a go of the guitar and the song came pretty quick.
Kelly Jones
#60. Shortly after my Ph.D., Alfred Kastler urged me to accept a teaching position at the University of Paris. I followed his advice and started to teach at the undergraduate level.
Claude Cohen-Tannoudji
#61. The human brain has a natural ability, inherent in its mechanism, to work on many levels, in a process of constant promptings, in a type of self-preservation.
If only humans understood ...
Most ignore it.
Amanda Dubin
#62. There should be a name for the syndrome that occurs when you're in Paris and you already miss it.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#63. He who contemplates the depths of Paris is seized with vertigo.
Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is more tragic.
Nothing is more sublime.
Victor Hugo
#64. In the three months since I'd moved to Paris, I hadn't been to a single party. I was eager to get dressed up and go somewhere, dying to talk to somebody other than the guy who sold me my zucchini.
Elizabeth Bard
#65. Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air;
And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;
And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome;
But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.
Henry Van Dyke
#66. Come on, baby." Paris combed his fingers through her hair. "Look past my terrible personality and hideous looks and throw me a bone. Teach me how to woo you properly."
She snorted. "I'd argue the hideous looks part."
"But not the terrible personality? Ouch. That hurts, baby.
Gena Showalter
#67. I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles.
Cole Porter
#68. I know the consequences, Manon," Ilyse conceded. "I know the fate you endured might one day be my own. But I refuse to be a prisoner for the rest of my life.
Melika Dannese Lux
#69. And waking, once again, face smudged into Andrea's couch, the red quilt humped around her shoulders, smelling coffee, while Andrea hummed some Tokyo pop song to herself in the next room, dressing, in a gray morning of Paris rain.
William Gibson
#70. Piano Man put up a fight but his resistance was futile. Hell hath no fury like a drunken girl at her bachelorette party in the mood to sing.
Vicki Lesage
#71. The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.
Ernest Gellner
#72. I would love to be where you are now, in Paris, that home of the planless, the free and joyous and emotional people." What
Hutchins Hapgood
#73. In Paris, the dance was everything. The dance of romance was what a man could remember in his old age. Didn't all young Americans come to Europe in search of that kind of romance?
Peggy Kopman-Owens
#74. If you want to establish an international presence you can't do so from New York. You need the consecration of Paris.
Oscar De La Renta
#75. Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love.
Julian Barnes
#76. If you see the world as gloomily as I see it, the only thing to do is laugh or shoot yourself.
John Le Carre
#77. 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
#78. France and America have a long history of mutual loathing and longing. Americans still dream of Paris; Parisians still dream of the America they find in the movies of David Lynch.
Rosecrans Baldwin
#79. Ever had Fighting Cock?"
"You talking about the bourbon or some sex position I haven't tried yet?" Paris asked.
Tiffany Reisz
#80. When I look back now, it must have been like Paris was at the time of Le Sacre du Printemps.
David Baker
#81. The scent of flowers is the glory of gardens and the scent of art is the glory of Paris!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#82. I wholeheartedly welcomed Charles de Gaulle eulogy of French valour, to which he attributed the liberation of Paris.
Coco Chanel
#83. The Italian Renaissance extends beyond food, of course. Just about every major Italian furniture designer now has a shop in Paris, and Le Bon Marche recently opened an outlet for Santa Maria Novella perfumes, elixirs and soaps from Florence on its ground floor.
Elaine Sciolino
#84. I dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. I studied with the Royal Academy of London for 11 years, and that did not pan out, but my love for being on stage was born there. And then, I actually went to drama school in Paris, France. That's where it first started.
Diane Kruger
#85. One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the runways.
James Gleick
#86. Behind every wall and every mirror and every vent, I hear sounds: breathing, rustling, footsteps, and murmurs. I try to tell myself it's just mice making their nests behind the barriers, but since when do rodents whisper?
A.G. Howard
#87. He wanted to tell the baby that Paris was like a poem in stone.
Simon Van Booy
#88. The Arab who built himself a hut with marbles from the temple of Palmyra is more philosophical than all the curators of the museums of London, Paris, and Munich.
Anatole France
#89. Fly Away changed my life. There are certain songs that do. When I won the Grammy, I was in Paris. I sort of forgot about it.
Lenny Kravitz
#90. I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix.
Zoe Kravitz
#91. I've always enjoyed playing in Paris, ever since I was a junior and won the junior event there. Being Swiss, this is the Grand Slam that is closest to us - the one we watch first and visit first if we are lucky enough.
Stanislas Wawrinka
#92. Those early days in Paris were nearly forty years behind him and yet, in the final pages he writes of Hadley, I wished I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.
Paula McLain
#93. In response to a tactless question he once said to me, 'What do you expect? This lousy neighbourhood gave me the come-on. I couldn't resist.
Jacques Yonnet
#94. The chief danger about Paris is that it is such a strong stimulant.
T. S. Eliot
#95. I like spending time at home. In Paris, people drop by and have a bite to eat, or they drop by and watch Friends on TV. I take my dog to the office there, and I walk to work sometimes.
Marc Jacobs
#96. Paris, the FedEx deliveryman of Pleasure and Fatality.
Gena Showalter
#97. The first red carpet I did was at New York's Paris Theatre ... It was this beautiful night, and everyone is screaming my name. I'm the least pretentious actress you can ever meet. Someone said to me that I look like I've been doing this forever, and I said that's because I watch E!
Amy Landecker
#98. Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.
Gore Vidal
#99. In Zurich, in a cafe overlooking the Limmat, I ate butter-drenched white asparagus pulled from the ground that morning; it had the aftertaste of champagne. I've been able to appreciate epic meals in San Francisco, New Orleans, Berlin, Paris, Las Vegas.
J.R. Moehringer
#100. I mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn't know, don't know whether I'm in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits.
H.D.
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