French Author Quotes

You have to hold on and be patient. Pain lasts for a while, but you must leave room for happiness when you find it. ~ S.N. Lemoing

What kind of person do you wish to be? A part of those who take action, who try the hardest, or of those who go with the flow? ~ S.N. Lemoing

I beg your pardon. Sometimes, it's true I can be stubborn.'
'Sometimes?' she added derisively.
'Quite often,' he tempered. ~ S.N. Lemoing

There is a bright spot or two for the Spaniards. French toast has become freedom toast on the Air Force One breakfast menu, but the Spanish omelet is still a Spanish omelet. ~ Suzanne Fields

Ahhh, my winter cozy woosah place to re-craft brain-cell recharge, and recreate; for the author & reader community...that place is a bookstore, and its cafe becomes a welcoming hangout, almost any day. ~ Tracey Bond

I think when a reader reads a whole book - which takes six to ten hours - that's kind of a gift to the author. The gift of close, undivided attention. To who else do we listen so closely for eight straight hours? And when readers give that gift to me, I'm grateful for it. ~ Po Bronson

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview] ~ Hilary Mantel

What I know is that if I was asked to teach mathematics in French for a week to young kids, I would do my homework and I think I could do a decent job. I don't think a degree in education would make me a better teacher. I sometimes teach in college. I don't teach for long periods of time, but I give workshops and I think I can communicate stuff. So, it's about communicating. ~ Philippe Falardeau

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly
except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses; never, I believe, by people. ~ Mark Twain

Few books are more thrilling than certain confessions, but they must be honest, and the author must have something to confess. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

The author apologizes for being unable to afford a ghost writer, which explains the lack of a distinctive prose style. ~ Richard Armour

I listen to the rainfall,
my words wanna flow!
Droplets run down the wall,
where do they go?
Letters in the raw,
mesh together for the show! ~ Leslie Austin

All mankind is of one author," he said slowly, " and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. Then there are bits I havena got by heart, but I liked this one: The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth" - and his hand squeezed mine gently - "and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God." "Hmm." I thought about that for a bit. ~ Diana Gabaldon

When Job lifted his face to the Storm, when he asked and was answered, he learned that he was very small. He learned that his life was a story. He spoke with the Author, and learned that the genre had not been an accident. God tells stories that make Sunday school teachers sweat and mothers write their children permission slips excusing them from encountering reality. ~ N.D. Wilson

4. THE CRUMBLING WALL

(Hamburger, prepared medium well, with bacon and barbecue sauce. Courtesy of that place on Solano, where, it should be mentioned, they use much too much barbecue sauce, which anyone should know has the almost immediate effect of soaking the bun, the bun becoming like oatmeal, inedible, the burger ruined, all in a matter of minutes--so quick that even when the burger is picked up and patrons attempt to save the bun ('Separate them! Quick! Get the bun away from the sauce! Now scrape! Scrape!'), it's always too late, necessitating the keeping, at home, of a stash of replacement buns, which are then toasted, heavily, to provide maximum resistance to the sauce's degenerative effects. Served with potatoes of the French kind, and fruit, as above. ~ Dave Eggers

I expect to think that I would rather be author of your book [The Origin of Species] than of any other on Nat. Hist. Science.
[Letter to Charles Darwin 12 Dec 1859] ~ Joseph Dalton Hooker

This was a different form of French resistance in Paris on this day, all of these people coming together and sending out pictures like this to the world about the world we still want this to be, instead of the one that terrorists want, and that means all terrorists, the world where we live in constant fear. ~ Kimberley Strassel

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author. ~ Anton Chekhov

I had my first French meal and I never got over it. It was just marvelous. We had oysters and a lovely dry white wine. And then we had one of those lovely scalloped dishes and the lovely, creamery buttery sauce. Then we had a roast duck and I don't know what else. ~ Julia Child

The values we rightly associate with the modern age - the "liberty, equality, and fraternity" of the French revolution - are all endangered today not by the dead hand of tradition but by modernity itself, and they can be salvaged only by moving beyond it. ~ Harvey Cox

Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself
thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done. ~ Henrik Ibsen

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel. ~ Virginia Woolf

He wasn't a man given to romance, but the perfect weight of this woman in his arms and the majesty of the skies above them filled him with an unexpected sense of peace. Moments later he carried her ~ Kitty French

The French have the perfect word for it: 'flaneur'. It means to stroll around aimlessly but enjoyably, observing life and your surroundings. Baudelaire defined a flaneur as 'a person who walks the city in order to experience it'. ~ Gemma Burgess

Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English. ~ Casey Stengel

Providence has given to the French the empire of the land, to the English that of the sea, to the Germans that of
the air! ~ Thomas Carlyle

You will find your horizons expanding and your thought processes becoming more creative. That is true mind power! ~ Stephen Richards

A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance. ~ Terry Teachout

Inherent in the French concept of happinness is the knowledge that time is limited and joy is fleeting. It's a moment, never to be repeated. ~ Jamie Cat Callan

The poetical term fête galante refers to a new genre of paintings and drawings that blossomed in the early 18th century during the [French] Regency period (1715-1723) and whose central figure was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). Inspired by images of bucolic merrymaking in the Flemish tradition, Watteau and his followers created a new form, with a certain timelessness, characterised by greater subtlety and nuance.

These depict amorous scenes in settings garlanded with luxuriant vegetation, real or imaginary: idealised dancers, women and shepherds are shown engaged in frivolous pursuits or exchanging confidences. The poetical and fantastical atmospheres that are a mark of his work are accompanied by a quest for elegance and sophistication characteristic of the Rococo movement, which flourished during the Age of Enlightenment, evidenced in his flair for curved lines and light colours.

The flexibility of the fête galante theme proved to be an invitation to experimentation and innovation, and the genre was to inspire several generations of artists, occupying a central place in French art throughout the 18th century. Works by other highly creative painters, such as François Boucher (1703-1770) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), illustrate their very personal visions of the joys of the fête galante as first imagined by Watteau. ~ Christoph Vogtherr

My favorite, and the author I wish I was reading right now and always is Nora Ephron. I love the humor, the awareness, the sense of self-deprecation. She is such a role model to me. ~ Garance Dore

Voilà," she says, and not like your aunt says it either, unless your aunt is a sophisticated French actress from the 1960s whose breath makes you feel faint - in a good way. I'm not so sure I care at all that she's better than me, as long as she keeps saying things in French. ~ Steve Brezenoff

The special knowledge you are about to learn will reveal a "letter theory" that was set into motion from the very first verse in your Bible. It is as though the divine author is telling the reader to expect Hebrew letters and numbers to weave messages, in the sub-text, through the rest of the Bible - starting with verse one. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

It's only because I feel like such a philistine spending all that time in hair and makeup that I started to knit. I used to spend that time studying Italian and French. Then after I had two kids, my brain turned to mush and I took up knitting. ~ Felicity Huffman

Cathy Clamp is a visionary author, creating new worlds that are both strong and vividly drawn. Adventure and excitement at its best. ~ Yasmine Galenorn

A well-developed and versed character will write the story for you. ~ A.R. Voss

Mastering the Art of French Cooking ... doesn't mean it has to be fancy cooking, although it can be as elaborate as you wish. ~ Julia Child

Life is short and TBR lists are long. ~ Katja Millay

The author knows just what he wants to illustrate and how he would like it to be done. ~ Louis Leakey

I'd always admired writers. I'd always loved words on a page. Somehow, words seemed to bypass image and get straight to the heart of things. Somehow, words seemed big enough to contain pain, and sentences could pull broken bits together. ~ Rosie O'Donnell

Own the moment or the moment will own you ~ Daren Martin

Now, now. Southern ladies don't French-kiss and tell. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Nordenson describes wrestling with work as with a large force that wants to have its way with you, even as you want to have your way with it. This wrestling, sinewy and particular as its wrestler, enlarges us as we read our way into her life with its incisive insights and explorations. Can one wrestle meditatively? This author has learned the art and we are the benefactors. ~ Luci Shaw

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately. ~ Bryan Burrough

I come from Yorkshire in England where we like to eat chip sandwiches - white bread, butter, tomato ketchup and big fat french fries cooked in beef dripping. ~ Helen Fielding

For many people, morality means a set of rules governing the disposition on one's genital organs; or a set of injunctions against lying, stealing, or killing except when such acts are sanctioned by church or state. ~ Marilyn French

As an author the question I get asked the most is, "why do you write?" My knee jerk response is, "Because I love it," which is true, but not the whole truth.
So here is my revised response to that question; "I write for the thirteen year old me who hated reading and craved something different than the boring literature I was forced to read for school. I write to see something I want to read exist in the world. I write because it becomes unbearable to hold so many stories in my head without a way to express them, but most importantly, I write to be true to myself. ~ Day Parker

If you are afraid of the critics you will never write a word ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Let us be French, let us be English, but most importantly let us be Canadian! ~ John A. Macdonald

When I write, regardless of what I'm writing, or how I approach the writing task, I've got this image or shape or feeling inside me somewhere, a sort of embroidery pattern, a sort of magic-pencil outline, a sort of distant melody." - Pamela Mordecai ~ Pamela Mordecai

Annoyance has made me bilingual. ~ Gayle Forman

I want to see all oppressed people throughout the world free. And the only way we can do this is by moving toward a revolutionary society where the needs and wishes of all people can be respected.' With these words the radical philosophy professor Angela Davis paraphrases Isaiah's ancient messianic dream of the lion that will peacefully lie down with the lamb in a completely good world. But what the Biblical prophet perhaps could not know is contained with a clarity that leaves nothing to be desired in the opening sentence of an address of the French Senate to Napoleon I: Sire, the desire for perfection is one of the worst maladies that can affect the human mind. ~ Paul Watzlawick