With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes.

We were a family who had come from nothing and now we had respect from French people of all sorts.

Mayonnaise: One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

I'd had a relationship with a French girl a Japanese girl an American girl a Filippina and she was there all the time - a Lancashire girl. I thought: 'It's a Lancashire girl I was looking for. Why didn't I realize it?'

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.

I had art as a major along with English French and History. I had dance modern dance. In English I was allowed to write my own poetry which I eventually got published.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French more than English.

French is a foreign language but I've been speaking it since I was 18 so it's second nature to me.

In movies there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet difficult undertaking requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.