To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.

People say that I could sing the phone book and make it sound good.

I've always wanted to sing, just as I've always known that one day I would have my own niche in the annals of song. It was a feeling I had.

If God has allowed me to earn so much money, it is because He knows I give it all away.

Death does not exist.

As far as I'm concerned, love means fighting, big fat lies, and a couple of slaps across the face.

All I've done all my life is disobey.

Death is the beginning of something.

I think you have to pay for love with bitter tears.

I'd like to see one person - just one - who would own up to having been a coward.

Money? How did I lose it? I never did lose it. I just never knew where it went.

To be successful in my native France, where people speak the same language and understand me, is nothing.

I wouldn't mind at all coming back to earth after my death.

I've been thinking about Jesus. Don't you find it a bit strange that, since He was living with His family and all, He up and left them just when they needed him most?

I want to make people cry even when they don't understand my words.

Tell me what you'd like to hear me sing. I'll sing whatever you like, after which I'll take up a collection, if you don't mind.

Singing is a way of escaping. It's another world. I'm no longer on earth.

Don't care what people say. Don't give a damn about their laws.

I don't want to die an old lady.

To sing is to bring to life; impossible if the words are mediocre, however good the music.

Id like to see one person just one who would own up to having been a coward.

It is crystal clear to me that if Arabs put down a draft resolution blaming Israel for the recent earthquake in Iran it would probably have a majority, the U.S. would veto it and Britain and France would abstain.

I use a retouching varnish which is made in France, Libert, and that's all the varnish I use.

No player can become accustomed to New York's climate in August in a few days. The playing conditions, the courts in New York and France are very different.

There is a neurologist, a woman over at Harvard who wanted me to come talk to them, and in France I have a lot of readers in the sciences. I can't tell you why.

Potentially he could be. He scored the goal four years ago in France against Argentina that was extraordinary.

Sometimes, but the year I lived in France I started to write songs.

The liberation movement which I led in Algeria, the organization that I created to fight the French army, was at first a small movement of nothing at all. We were but some tens of people throughout Algeria, a territory that is five times the size of France.

It is not what France gave you but what it did not take from you that was important.

When our boys come home from France, we will have the hags flung out.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the garden of France - that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

My son loves the Hotel du Cap, in the south of France.

So, thanks God, our films, our first films were suddenly being appreciated by the Western media; especially France was very good, and Switzerland was very good.

Altogether apart from that, it would be a disgrace to us to make this bargain with Germany at the expense of France, a disgrace from which the good name of this country would never recover.

The phenomenon of university creative writing programs doesn't exist in France. The whole idea is regarded as a novelty, or an oddity.

On landing at New York I caught the yellow fever. The kind man who commanded the ship that brought me from France took charge of me and placed me under the care of two Quaker ladies. To their skillful and untiring care I may safely say I owe my life.

Ours is a country built more on people than on territory. The Jews will come from everywhere: from France, from Russia, from America, from Yemen... Their faith is their passport.

The recent riots in France demonstrate the problem European countries face where second and third generation immigrants still do not consider themselves French, German, or English.

This programme would only really make sense and work properly if it was also broadcast on France's international television channel TV5. So I ended up with a double production, on France 2 and TV5.

The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.

You know, I left the country when Reagan got in; I went to France. And when George Bush Jr. got in, my instincts told me it was time to go - I'd felt that we had grown above that, you know?

It was one thing to contain the Soviet Union in Europe because Britain, France, and Germany were all willing to join in. But will Japan and other Asian countries be willing to join in the containment of China?

In Holland and Spain and France, where so many of us come from, people aren't interested in the sex lives of their players. We don't hear these stories - even in Italy where the media is right on top of football.

A friend in the War Office warned me that I was in Kitchener's black books, and that orders had been given for my arrest next time I appeared in France.

The people have spoken. Their decision is sovereign. We all respect it... I wish good luck to those who will now govern France.

Anyway, I collapsed in France in the middle of a tour. I hadn't been eating properly, I was getting very phobic about audiences, and I collapsed in pure fright.

France cannot be destroyed. She is an old country who, despite her misfortunes, has, and always will have, thanks to her past, a tremendous prestige in the world, whatever the fate inflicted upon her.

The role of Italy and of Austria has diminished as has that of France and Britain; Germany and Japan have suffered catastrophically.