The passage from the big to the little is what makes Paris beautiful, and you have to be prepared to be small-to live, to trudge, to have your head down in melancholy and then lift it up, sideways-to...

What was maddening was not the anti-Americanism, which is understandable and even, in its Astérix-style resistance to American domination, admirable. What is maddening is the bland certainty, the...

What made me sad just then was the new knowledge that things changed, and there was nothing you could do about it. In a way, that was a Parisian emotion too.

How could I forget you, Darryl? You called me God.

The sublime moment of cooking, though, is really the moment when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things. It is the moment when the red onions have been chopped and the bacon has been sliced into...

There is, I believe now, a force in stories, words in motion, that either drives them forward past things into feelings or doesn't.

The trouble with mental catch is that the ball you throw changes in midair into another. –109

Parisians believe they are superior by birth, they do not believe, as Americans do, that they are invulnerable by right.

One economic problem is especially acute here: Unemployment … Most of the other problems, the ones that create a sense of crisis, are anticipatory. They grow out of the fear that the right-wing...

It is, I think, the journalist's vice to believe that all history can instantly be reduced to experience: {Pierre, an out-of-work pipe fitter in the suburb of Boulougne, is typical of the new class of...

A world in which everything is fashionable is impossible to imagine, because it implies that there would be nothing to provide a contrast. The reason that when you place any two things side by side,...

In Paris explanations come in a predictable sequence, no matter what is being explained. First comes the explanation in terms of the unique, romantic individual, then the explanation in terms of...

...we see life as deeply in our pleasures as in our pains.

It was odd, he thought... to be in love with a girl at once so musical and so heavily armed.

Tenderness toward one's lost self is sentimental; tenderness toward one's lost longings is just life.

{Commentary by J.-P. Quélin, food critic for Le Monde}. {New York and London chefs} are cooking, he says, at a level of originality that defies judgment, defies criticism, defies the grammar of...

There are at least three moments a month when you are ready to leap across a conter or a front seat to strangle someone: the woman at France Télecom who won't give you the fax ribbons that are there...

The world was once haunted by Titus Oates's self-made epitaph: I am going outside and may be some time. Well, we are going inside and may be some time, we are inside, and have been for awhile. The...