Bill O'Brien Quotes

Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.

The English are predisposed to pride, the French to vanity.

I am Parisian. I don't love the French.

I know the French mentality.

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

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.

Oh, I'm not English, I cannot talk on behalf of an English person. I'm French. I can say about French. They are quite emotional, though, and they talk about their emotions.

People think that everyone wears black in France; in fact they all wear grey.

The French have only negative things to say about everything and everyone.

When my first film 'The Seventh Continent' was presented here 12 years ago, non-Austrian spectators would come up to me and say, 'Is Austria that terrible?', whereas for me it wasn't about Austria but about highly industrialised cultures everywhere.

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.

The French are known for their rudeness … but if you speak French … they get a lot more polite.

I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomiting. I cannot prevent the French from being French.

When I want to know what the French people think, I ask myself.

Here's some news you might find surprising: By and large, the French like Jews.

I understand more when I travel why people believe that the French are arrogant.

The French are funny, sex is funny, and comedies are funny, yet no French sex comedies are funny.

The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you. But that is no reason to bypass this beautiful country, whose master chefs have a well-deserved worldwide reputation for trying to trick people into eating snails. Nobody is sure how this got started. Probably a couple of French master chefs were standing around one day, and they found a snail, and one of them said: 'I bet that if we called this something like 'escargot,' tourists would eat it.' Then they had hearty laugh, because 'escargot' is the French word for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm.'

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

The function of criticism should not be confused with the function of reform.

I’m aware of the- the fact that people elsewhere in the world think differently from us. I can sort of see us, us Americans with their eyes. And not all that I see is- is attractive. I see an insular people who are- are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical.