I always tend to remember the funny moments. When I lost my shoe (even though it was funny) there was something motivating about it, I just ended in this spastic emotional way. I tend to remember the more extreme moments.
I grew up in France, my first language was French, and I tend to gravitate towards French cooking.
There are two kinds of speeches: the Mother Hubbard speech, which, like the garment, covers everything but touches nothing, and the French bathing suit speech, which covers only the essential points.
It's always easy to get people to condemn threats to free speech when the speech being threatened is speech that they like. It's much more difficult to induce support for free speech rights when the speech being punished is speech they find repellent.
A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'
The French use gardens to show grandeur and the English to show how things have endured for hundreds of years, but for me, they're all about fantasy.
The only consistent hobby I've had is studying Spanish and French because of some delusion of grandeur to work around the world. I love sports but usually I'm looking for the next job.
Practically all writers and artists are aware of their destiny and see themselves as actors in a fateful drama. With me, nothing is momentous: obscure youth, glorious old age, fateful coincidences - nothing really matters. I have written a number of good sentences. I have kept free of delusions. I know I am going to die soon.
Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes--the thought and preparation, vision and revision--whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history.
When I arrived at Columbia, I gave up acting and became interested in all things French. French poetry, French history, French literature.
We need French chaplains and imams, French-speaking, who learn French, who love France. And who adhere to its values. And also French financing.
If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none. If there is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.
When I was a child, I grew up speaking French, I mean, in a French public school. So my first contact with literature was in French, and that's the reason why I write in French.
Certain movies that are trying to evoke history are just like being in an antique store, and all you notice is that all the stuff has been gathered together, and it feels like a pile of antiques. How can you think that that will evoke the past? It doesn't even have to evoke anything, but anyway, it's how we're living. It's this moment where nobody has to immediately think too much about how things are being documented. It's a great time.
There are moments of high mood, there are moments of low mood, there are moments of injury, there are moments of strength, there are moments of progress, there are moments of stagnation. All we can do is keep on pushing.
I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style.