“My ambition was to be cosmopolitan. I grew up in the suburbs. I went to college in Maine. I had a dream in my head that if you wanted to be the most urbane, living-life-to-the-fullest kind of person, Paris was the place to be.”
“My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.”
“Paris's neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl - a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig's tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20.”
“When I was a kid, we didn't eat in restaurants much, but a good report card meant my sister or I could choose anyplace in town for a dinner out, and I always picked Benny's, a dive bar near the train station, because they had the best nachos around.”
“Of course, there's no reason that Paris should have decent Mexican food. It's a silly expectation - there's a Mexican population in Paris, but they're not exactly traveling there from across the border. Paris also doesn't do Peruvian all that well, either.”
“Tintin comics evoke Bermuda, where my parents doled out comics for good behavior and my grandmother taught me how to shuffle cards.”
“American-French relations, their pitch and volume, have always been influenced by the media.”
“Bookstores don't exactly dot the American highway in the grand manner of Sbarros.”
“For years, I've felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I've so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.”
“Heads of France lead from a palace, and traditionally they retire to a cloud.”