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You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.

The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'

The French people need to have all the facts so they can choose. And I won't be running away from it or hiding from it.

There is a certain dignity to being French.

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.

There is a painful joke that Europeans often tell of their Gallic neighbors: God created France, the most beautiful country in the world with so much good in it, and ended up feeling guilty about it. He had to do something to make it fair. And so, he created the French people.

Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.

They're very nationalistic the French - or they used to be. Very insular. Pretty arrogant.