Quotes from Pamela Druckerman

The French view is really one of balance, I think... What French women would tell me over and over is, it's very important that no part of your life - not being a mom, not being a worker, not being a wife - overwhelms the other part.

Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.

A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.

I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they'll regret things that they haven't done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to.

I'm always hoping no one is following me around with a camera.

I think kids in France, and certainly in my household, don't necessarily stop interrupting when you tell them, but they gradually become more aware of other people, and that means that you can have the expectation of finishing a conversation.

Just do what you want more often. Don't be so worried about what other people expect.

Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.

We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true.

There's this idea in America that you can be whatever you want. That remains an ideal in terms of how you dress too - when you go shopping, you try on all possible selves and then decide.

Where Americans might coo over a child's most inane remark to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening.

In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.

Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide.

Although I wrote a book about infidelity around the world, I ended up concluding that fidelity is quite a good idea.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.

Certain woman will be jealous of how skinny you are, no matter what's causing it.

Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.

When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.

When we're in the U.S., my kids instantly start snacking all the time. I don't know how it happens. There is just more food available all the time. There aren't all these little different varieties of snack foods in France.

Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.

When you're further along in your career, you probably have more money and more means; you have to stop yourself from giving your child too much. Whereas, if you're in twenties, you might just get by.

Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.

One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.

I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.