The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.

For me, football is just a game, not a drama.

I gave everything in my career so I have no regrets at all.

I was the classic midfield organiser who could also score goals.

During such a competition players are there for a long time as well as all the people around them. They need to train, to eat, to go out. There ought to be something in it for everyone. On that particular point, my experience has been a bonus.

The team which I led to the 1992 European Championship Finals is the only one in the history of the entire competition to have won every single one of its qualifying matches.

Some games you win, some you lose, and some you draw.

Consequently, I won just about everything I set out to win, everything bar the World Cup, of course. But even now, I don't regret that, because I was part of a team which twice reached the semi-finals.

We arrived in Argentina with a lot of injured players, including our goalkeeper. Also we were unlucky to be drawn in the same group as the two tournament favourites Italy and Argentina.

At times like that it's difficult to remember what's at stake, that history is in the making. As a player you feel so cut off sometimes, it can be tough... Which is why it is an enormous advantage to play at home.

The match against Brazil was football at its best. Both sides had opportunities to win the game.

What differences were there between Maradona and Platini?

We were the best team in the world: European champions in 1984, we qualified without a hitch and 86 was to be the swan song for a very experienced side.

In any case, you can't turn back the clock.

The 1984 European Championships were held in France and that was something important. I felt on form then, even though I was practically always injured at all the World Cups. It's a great memory. But in any case, the past is past.

I was never a prisoner to my footballing status.

For me football is more about making the right pass at the right time.

At Euro '92 itself, we bowed out to the eventual winners, Denmark, in our final group match.

When I follow the finals of the European Cups, I look at all the aspects surrounding protocol, to get some ideas. I am interested in personalities, sponsors and the stands. But as soon as the whistle goes, it's all on the pitch.

There would probably be less of a frenzy among the French public.

In 1986, we gave it our best shot but we didn't get the run of the ball.

Whenever I was on the pitch, I always tried to win.

You know, my role as Vice Chairman is a lot less tiring than playing matches every three days.

I was playing the best football of my career at the time, finishing top scorer in Italy three year's running. There were other good players around but I think I was the best at that time.

A football team represents a way of being a culture.

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.