It's true that the French have a certain obsession with sex, but it's a particularly adult obsession. France is the thriftiest of all nations; to a Frenchman sex provides the most economical way to have fun. The French are a logical race.
One of the most devastating enemies of the family is radical sex education in the public school. It is more explicit than necessary for the good of the child. Too much sex education too soon causes undue curiosity and obsession with sex.
There is an element of delusional obsession in the French political elite's preoccupation with the notion that France is still a global power.
My wife's French. I mean I speak a bit of French but I've lived amongst French, you know, most of my adult life.
We need French chaplains and imams, French-speaking, who learn French, who love France. And who adhere to its values. And also French financing.
My most favorite entrance music of all time... it's that, "You're my obsession, you're my obsession" song [Animotion's "Obsession"].
It's very important to say that French doesn't belong to France and to French people. Now you have very wonderful poets and writers in French who are not French or Algerian - who are from Senegal, from Haiti, from Canada, a lot of parts of the world.
My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.
If you can come to this nowness without sex, sex, by and by will become useless, it will disappear. It will not be a desire then. If you want to move in it you can move into it as a fun, but not as a desire. Then there is no obsession in it because you are not dependent on it.
I do write about obsession, but I don't think I have an obsession for writing. I'm not a compulsive writer. I like to watch obsession in other people, watch the way it makes them behave.
I always say if you're going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle get a Frenchman, you know. I'm not French. And yeah, sure I could get with a dialect coach and work for six months trying to talk like a Frenchman. But there's some French actors. Just get one of them, you know.
France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.
In 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. Within months, his army collapsed and fled. It was routed not by the Italian army but by a microbe. A mysterious new disease spread through sex killed many of Charles’s soldiers and left survivors weak and disfigured. French soldiers spread the disease across much of Europe, and then it moved into Africa and Asia. Many called it the French disease. The French called it the Italian disease. Arabs called it the Christian disease. Today, it is called syphilis.
If you had a daily printout from the brain of an average twenty-four-year-old male, it would probably go like this: sex, need coffee, sex, traffic, sex, sex, what an asshole, sex, ham sandwich, sex, sex, etc
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.
In America sex is an obsession. In Europe it's a fact of life.
I don't even think about the word. But I do have certain things where I just go, "Aaaaahhh," irritatingly boring and insistent because I want it to look that way and I can do it - I don't even know if you'd call it passion or obsession. Obsession, possibly, but I really love what I do.