People From Paris

"The ultimate outcome of our ­actions cannot be known. But despite our limited awareness, I believe we must always act with compassion."

"Like the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, I have tried to tell the stories my characters would tell if they were writers"

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) I’m not yet the writer I aspire to be, but at my age, great books written by women over 60 give me hope. Diana Athill, Colette, Harriett Doerr, Marguerite Duras, Grace Paley, Elena Poniatowska, Jean Rhys, Mercé Rodoreda, to name but a few."

"(What Mexican books deserve greater attention in the United States?) I read Spanish too slowly to have any expertise here. But I do love and admire the works of Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Rosario Castellanos, and, most recently, Fernanda Melchor and Cristina Rivera Garza."

"style, as I see it, is not an adornment added to a work. It is more, as Buffon said, that “le style c’est l’homme même”—style is the man himself...That famous line is actually the conclusion of a longer thought—“Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste.” In my own words, I would say that style is a manifestation of the writer’s being, which, of course, changes over time but retains something essential of who he is...One does not develop a style. One develops oneself. Or, perhaps more accurately, one is born with a certain character and life shapes it. And then, if you write or paint or sculpt, you do those things with the person you have ­become. And that is style."

"if I had been, say, a French writer, I would have been free to write whatever I wished, which would have been writing of an imaginative sort. But in Mexico, because of the suffering that is the result of centuries of corruption, there is a moral obligation to write of this. I could not ignore it, and, because I have become known for it and have refined my ability to write this way through practice, it became my principal work."

"Boundaries, after all—of custom, of language, of what is and is not permitted—not only function to keep others out but also keep those inside from expanding."

"I live to the rhythm of my country and I cannot remain on the sidelines. I want to be here. I want to be part of it. I want to be a witness. I want to walk arm in arm with it. I want to hear it more and more, to cradle it, to carry it like a medal on my chest. Activism is a constant element in my life, even though afterwards I anguish over not having written "my own things." Testimonial literature provides evidence of events that people would like to hide, denounces and therefore is political and part of a country in which everything remains to be done and documented."

"I have always responded to challenges, followed apocalyptical personalities, apostles, Rasputins, Joan of Arcs who hear voices that come from Heaven, illuminated guides of humanity, holders of truth, priests."

"I have always had questions, and to this day, I don't have a single answer."

"I would like to return to earth because I love life."

"Life is very resistant. People-the same cannon fodder that nourishes great universal misfortunes, "the wretched of the earth," as Frantz Fanon called them. Suddenly, during an earthquake, one of them saves a life."

"Carefully I asked them questions, visited them in their crowded neighborhoods, watched their kites cross the sky in February, treated them like kites, because that's how testimonial literature is. It fills one with anxiety, with insecurity. One handles very fragile material, people's hearts; their names, which are their honor; their work; and their time. And one tries to turn it into memorable material."

"In light of her later books, we tend to read irony into Elena Poniatowska's claim of meek docility, but the lesson of her early interviews predicts Audre Lorde's eloquent and cautionary charge that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.""

"I have always been drawn to characters like Jesusa Palancares. María Sabina, the one who performed the ceremony of the sacred mushrooms (LSD in Oaxaca), Juan Perez Jolote (the Chamula peasant from Chiapas), Demetrio Vallejo (the railroad leader), all popular heroes, even if they are not recognized. I admire them because of their wisdom and the way they impart it, with great patience, great prudence, with respect for the ignorance of the person who asks the questions."

"We have all been made bad, we are all needy, all unwanted guests around the feast, invited at the last minute. In recognizing this lies our creativity."

"I learned, as they say, by doing. I began as an interviewer for the society pages of Excélsior—the only sort of thing a young woman could expect in those days...Since Excélsior is a daily paper, I had to produce these pieces every day with almost no time for review. Then I would read them in print and see that I had spent too much time on things of little importance and failed to ask about what mattered most. And so,with frequent embarrassment, that is how I learned. One also learns ­humility doing interviews, because people may not want to give you much time and so keep you waiting in an anteroom or are dismissive or in a bad mood, and all this has to be accepted."

"It is one thing to identify oneself as a citizen of a country and to love its landscape, its people, its arts and culture. It is quite another thing to assess the workings of its social and political structure—the degree of freedom and opportunity enjoyed by its people, its standard of education and quality of life. A Mexican peasant has virtually no chance of becoming anything else. The standard of education was low fifty years ago and, if anything, is even lower today."

"in Latin America reality surpasses fiction."

"To this day, if I ask so many questions, it is because I don't have a single answer. I believe I will die like this, still searching, with a question mark engraved on my eyelids."

"That the poorest Mexicans don't deserve their ruling class is a truth that leaps out at once."

"I absorbed Mexico through the maids. A system still persists in Latin America which consists of privileged people having at their beck and call the poorest of the poor."

"There is an immense abyss between the very few who have money and the vast number who are poor—and there is scarce concern on the part of those who have for those who do not. The politicians can be numbered among those who have. So my being a Mexican writer and loving my country has come to find its expression in opening up this reality to other Mexicans and to the larger world, expressed through the voices of the least empowered—women, especially, and poor people of both genders."

"Without realizing it the maids provided me with a version of Benito Juárez; they were all like Benito Juárez. Like him they vindicated themselves: "Dirty foreigners." Like him they defended Mexico, as stubborn as mules. Like him they had no roof of their own and had eaten only poor people's food, and for me, a girl raised on French mashed potatoes, discovering them meant entering into "the other.""

"Of course, imaginative writing always contains elements of the writer’s lived experience, but there is a ­different sort of freedom in it than there is in reporting or in novels based on interviews."

"The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street."

"To some extent Captain Liddell Hart's tactical theories are separable from his strategic ones, and here his prophecies have been all too well justified by events. No military writer in our time has done more to enlighten public opinion. But his justified war with the Blimps has perhaps overcoloured his judgment... Disgusted by the spectacle of Passchendaele, Captain Liddell Hart seems to have ended by believing that wars can be won on the defensive or without fighting—and even, indeed, that a war is better half-won than won outright. That holds good only when your enemy thinks likewise, a state of affairs which disappeared when Europe ceased to be ruled by an aristocracy."

"It would be doing Liddell Hart an injustice, both as a historian and as a controversialist, to suggest that this analysis of British strategy was anything more than a piece of brilliant political pamphleteering, sharply argued, selectively illustrated, and concerned rather to influence British public opinion and government policy than to illuminate the complexities of the past in any serious or scholarly way."

"I immediately read the "Role of the British Army" in Liddell Hart's book. I am impressed by his general theories."

"The real shortcoming of these stimulating essays...lies in Captain Liddell Hart's unwillingness to admit that war has changed its character. "Limited aims" strategy implies that your enemy is very much the same kind of person as yourself; you want to get the better of him, but it is not necessary for your safety to annihilate him or even to interfere with his internal politics. These conditions...have disappeared in the atomised world in which we are now living. Writing in 1932 or thereabouts, Captain Liddell Hart is able to say, "Has there ever been such a thing as absolute war since nations ceased to exterminate or enslave the defeated?" The trouble is that they haven't ceased. Slavery, which seemed as remote as cannibalism in 1932, is visibly returning in 1942, and in such circumstances it is impossible to wage the old style limited profit-making war, intent only on "safeguarding British interests" and making peace at the first opportune moment. As Mussolini has truly said, democracy and totalitarianism cannot exist side by side."

"At present one clear factor in the problem is that the offensive is as much at an advantage in the air as it is at a disadvantage on land. This comparison, in conjunction with our present deficiencies, has suggested that the offensive role of an expeditionary force might be entrusted to the Air Force. Apart from its greater promise of effect, it could be conducted from our own shores or from bases more easy to secure and more remote from the enemy than the zone an army requires; and it would avoid many of the complications involved, and evolving, when we land an army on the Continent. The Army could then be left to fulfil its Imperial garrison and police duties, with the possible addition of covering the oversea bases of our Expeditionary Air Force."

"Unless our field force could arrive on the scene during this opening phase—and it is difficult to see how it could, since it has to cross the sea—our assistance might be more profitably given in the form of a proportionately larger contribution in air strength."

"The new risks to such a force under modern military conditions have also to be weighed. The risks that were incurred in 1914, in landing a field force of 100,000 men in a foreign land, were much less than would be run to-day—when it may have greater distances to cover, and when both railways and roads will lie under the menace of air attack. Broken communications are bad enough when an army is in its own territory, or one where it has complete control. In face of air attack it is impossible to ignore the risk of a field force being stranded with no prospect either of reaching the front or of maintaining itself. In such a plight it could do little for the defence of British interests and it would be more nuisance than a help to any ally... Before the idea of intervention by land is accepted as politically indispensable, there should be full acknowledgement of its unstable military foundations. It should also be made clear to any nation looking to British aid, whether under the old Locarno Treaty or under its possible successor, first, that they may get more value from increased air assistance, which would naturally become effective sooner, in place of a field force; secondly, that the dispatch of a field force cannot imply a willingness to reinforce it without limit, and to expend the massed man-power of this nation, fully engaged as it must be by sea and and in the air, and in factory and farm, in another four years' process of exploring by trial and error a problem which can be, and could have been, examined scientifically."

"I have been reading Europe in Arms by Liddell Hart. If you have not already done so, you might find it interesting to glance at this, especially the chapter on the "Role of the British Army.""

"Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning 'lightning war'. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart's view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more 'indirect approach', he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike."

"If one weighs his [Carl von Clausewitz] influence and his emphasis, one might describe him historically as the Mahdi of mass and mutual massacre. For he was the source of the doctrine of "absolute war", the fight to a finish theory which, beginning with the argument that "war is only a continuation of state policy by other means", ended by making policy the slave of strategy."

"Clausewitz's principle of force without limit and without calculation of cost fits, and is only fit for, a hate-maddened mob. It is the negation of statesmanship—and of intelligent strategy, which seeks to serve the ends of policy."

"The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany. With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller, senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that 'the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars', dismissing motorized weapons as mere 'accessories to the man and horse'. Haig's brother concurred: the cavalry would 'never be scrapped to make room for the tanks'. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart's work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of 'a new type of warfare on the largest scale' that he learned the importance of 'the concentration of armour'."

"It was principally the books and articles of the Englishmen, Fuller, Liddell Hart and Martel, that excited my interest and gave me food for thought. These far-sighted soldiers were even then trying to make of the tank something more than just an infantry support weapon. They envisaged it in relationship to the growing motorization of our age, and thus they became the pioneers of a new type of warfare on the largest scale. I learned from them the concentration of armour, as employed in the battle of Cambrai. Further, it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army's communications, and also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army. So I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart."

"I love living intense situations, which leave their mark and enrich existence. The birth of a child totally changes the perception of the future. With my son Orso, a Corsican name, like his mother Gaëlle Pietri, I filled a void I didn't know existed."

"Since I became a dad, my life has been turned out completely differently. From then on, I try to devote time and energy to my son. On set, I am far from him physically but also in my head. Between these periods, I therefore devote all the time he needs to him."

"I have to thank my surgeon who did a great job. It [his scar] almost looks like a dimple. When I was maybe 6 years old, I stayed at my parents’ friend’s country house in France and they had this huge dog. The dog was sleeping on a tree and I jumped on his back like I was riding a horse or something. The dog wasn’t aggressive or mean, but it was just totally surprised when I did that and he tore up my cheek with his big paw. But it’s true, maybe the scar helped me in some way because it adds something to my face. It’s very interesting because it’s asymmetrical. It’s like a dimple that I only have on one side of my face. Many directors have used it for scenes in their films. The most memorable one was in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s A Very Long Engagement where I’m kissing Audrey Tautou and she runs her finger across the scar. [Laughs]"

"It's a huge upheaval. What was of extreme importance yesterday seems trivial today. Fatherhood brings you back to something very concrete, fills a void you weren't necessarily aware of, gives you a reason to live."

"I'd never met him before the film. I thought he was extremely cooperative, very sweet, unbelievably professional and he has a great face for the camera. He is cinegenic and very magnetic. He reminds me of a young Alain Delon."

"I am one of the actors who think that inactivity can be beneficial, it allows you to allow yourself to let go, to go deeper into yourself, to question yourself and to refocus."

"Moreover, like everyone, I think, injustices make me angry, even if I am not attached to a particular cause, that I am not campaigning for an association. Sometimes I blame myself, because in my position, I should probably be able to speak for something. But marking my choice is difficult for me. From global warming to child abuse to poverty, my head is spinning. You know, I'm a bit of a nihilist, or at least I define myself as an entropy: for me, the mess in our world is only getting worse. Yes, I know, I say this when I had a child, which is still a huge message of hope. It's a paradox, I know."

"Many people talk about this scar, and a few directors before [Peter Webber] were seduced, if I can say so, by this scar. I'm going to phone the surgeon and thank him for it. [laughs] I was six years old and a dog was sleeping in a garden, and I just jumped on his back like I would have done on a horse. And so he just hit me with his claws, and that made a nice little scar. But it looks like a dimple. It's nice, and it might help, sometimes, to express feelings in my acting. I'm not really conscious about this because I can't really see my face when I'm acting."

"I am very thankful to the dog. All of the directors love this scar."

"Maybe I'm lying to myself, but jealousy is a feeling that I think is totally foreign to me. In this environment, however, the competition is strong — seeing a role pass is sometimes a disappointment — but I would never draw jealousy from it directed towards another actor. On the other hand, I would have liked to have other talents. Like becoming a musician. Pianist, to be precise: I would have loved to know how to play the piano, although I have no gift for it, I have already tried, it's a waste of time (laughs). But all artistic gifts make me dream, like painting..."

"I'm in a state of shock today over the loss of Gaspard Ulliel. I had the chance to work with him once briefly, and I was so impressed by his dedication and his intelligence. He loved the cinema, and I know that he would have been an interesting filmmaker if he'd lived to realize his dream. It's just heartbreaking."