Quotes from Elaine Sciolino

When Pope Francis touched down on French soil for the first time in his papacy with a visit to the European Parliament in Strasbourg last November, Ms. Royal was the senior French official there to greet him.

In 1991, only two years into the Bush administration, Condoleezza Rice suddenly left her powerful job as the top Russia expert on the National Security Council and went back to California - to get a life.

I guess the biggest surprise I got going to Iran was that the Iranians really liked me as an American.

Massoumeh Ebtekar is the highest-ranking woman in Iran's government, a symbol of President Mohammed Khatami's promise to promote women into high-profile positions.

The first weekend after the attacks of September 11, George W. Bush had a meeting at Camp David with his top advisors, including Colin Powell, the secretary of state. And there was a lively debate about Iraq policy, in which some people from the Pentagon were arguing that the war against terrorism should include Saddam Hussein.

The Bush administration actually started out with an open mind towards Iran, by all indications. In fact, early in the administration, the White House tasked the various agencies of government to do an inter-agency review of Iran policy, as it did with Iraq policy and most of the big areas of the world.

The city of Paris is determined to promote the happiness-on-a-bike fantasy. Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo wants to turn the city into the most bike-friendly capital in the world.

In 1981, Ms. Ebtekar was made editor-in-chief of the English-language newspaper 'Kayhan International.' The man who gave her the job was Mr. Khatami, who was then head of the Kayhan publishing house.

When the sommelier Enrico Bernardo moved to Paris from Italy nearly two decades ago, the world of French gastronomy brutally rejected him. No matter that he had won the competition for best sommelier in Italy; when he asked 30 restaurateurs for work in their wine cellars, all turned him down.

Paris . . . is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers, to those capable of amusing themselves in its streets without regard to time when urgent business requires their presence elsewhere. —

An American writer who had come to visit France . . . asked quite naturally what it was that had kept me here so long. . . It was useless to answer him in words. I suggested instead that we take a stroll through the streets. —HENRY MILLER ON LIVING IN PARIS

The French are obsessed with history, partly out of a genuine affinity for the past, partly from a desire to cling to lost glory.

Consuming alcohol in public is allowed in France, which means drinkers overflow onto the sidewalk, especially on the Montmartre stretch. But it rarely gets out of control.

Showy makeup, she explained, is reserved for women who either make their living on the streets or are trying too hard.

He called him (it was always a man) a flâneur. "The crowd is his habitat, as air is for the bird or water for the fish," he wrote. "His passion and his profession is to wed the crowd. . . . To be away from home, but to feel oneself everywhere at home.

led her into a world of adventure and chance that comes with going secondhand. Taking my friends to secondhand shops on and around the rue des Martyrs is at the top of my must-do-in-Paris list. It

Francois Hollande, the president of France, and Segolene Royal, a senior cabinet minister who once ran for that post herself, have an exceptionally complicated relationship. The two lived together for 25 years, raising four children over that time.

Colin Powell has said over the years that Saddam Hussein is like a toothache. It recurs from time to time, and you just have to live with it. At other times, he's compared Saddam Hussein to a kidney stone that will eventually pass. But he has never said, 'You have to operate and take out the kidney stone.'

Every day since the start of the Tour de France, the popular 'Le Parisien' newspaper has published a story about a book written with the bicycle in mind.

Paris will give bicyclists more rights when it installs 4,300 signs throughout the city, allowing them to barrel though red lights and turn right on red.

We often forget that Iran has a long tradition and history with the United States. Iranians have been coming to the United States as students for decades. American businessmen were in Iran developing the oil fields. ...There was an American financial advisor to the Iranian government in the early part of the century.

Historically, the French have had a romantic attachment to their bikes. Though the first functioning two-wheeler is thought to have been invented by a German in 1817, it was the French who popularized and marketed the device in the 1860s, giving it the name 'bicycle.'

The Italian Renaissance extends beyond food, of course. Just about every major Italian furniture designer now has a shop in Paris, and Le Bon Marche recently opened an outlet for Santa Maria Novella perfumes, elixirs and soaps from Florence on its ground floor.

Even before September 11, there was a debate in the administration about whether or not military force should be used to oust Saddam Hussein. You're not going to find one person in the top echelons of the foreign policy and national security establishment in the U.S. government who's going to say that Saddam Hussein should not be out of power.