Peter Mayle Quotes

Beh oui. Better sticky than burned.

Gu himself presides over the room- a genial, noisy man with the widest, jauntiest, must luxuriant and ambitious mustache I have ever seen, permanently fighting gravity and the razor in its attempts to...

About Author

Peter Mayle ( "mail"; 14 June 1939 – 18 January 2018) was a British businessman turned author who moved to France in the 1980s. He wrote a series of bestselling memoirs of his life there, beginning with A Year in Provence (1989).

It was exciting at first... Then it became routine. I guess everything does, even if it's dangerous.

What a marvelous sunset,' she said. 'Yes,' replied her husband. 'Most impressive for such a small village.

The town maps in the 1939 [Michelin] guide were so accurate they were used by the Allied forces in 1944 during the liberation of France.

Cavaillon—which, as any Provençal will tell you, is the melon capital of the world—with

We had to be up early in the morning. We had a goat race to go to... We asked the old man confident in the knowledge that he, like every Frenchman, would be an expert. The goats who make the most drop...

Sunglasses must be kept on until an acquaintance is identified at one of the tables, but one must not appear to be looking for company. Instead, the impression should be that one is heading into the c...

Rain they take as a personal affront, shaking their heads and commiserating with each other in the cafés, looking with profound suspicion at the sky as though a plague of locusts is about to descend,...

Only snobs kiss once, I was told, or those unfortunates who suffer from congenital froideur. I then saw what I assumed to be the correct procedure - the triple kiss, left-right-left, so I tried it on...

Oh, that,' he said. 'Poncet is grooming his ass.

Depending on the inflection, ah bon can express shock, disbelief, indifference, irritation, or joy - a remarkable achievment for two short words.

A connoisseur of woe needs fresh worries from time to time, or he will become complacent.

Dar, bineînțeles, spusese el, se știe că englezii își omoară mieii de două ori: o dată când îi taie și a doua oară când îi gătesc.

We had been here often before as tourists, desperate for our annual ration of two or three weeks of true heat and sharp light. Always when we left, with peeling noses and regret, we promised ourselves...

The demented clatter-like nuts and bolts trying to escape from a biscuit tin-of the small Citroën van that every farmer drives home at lunchtime...

As our lawyer friend had noticed, men kiss other men. They squeeze shoulders, slap backs, pummel kidneys, pinch cheeks. When a Provençal man is truly pleased to see you, there is a real possibility of...

I called Monsieur Menicucci, and he asked anxiously about my pipes. I told him they were holding up well. That pleases me, he said, because it is minus five degrees, the roads are perilous, and I am f...

Look at those vines,' he said. 'Nature is wearing her prettiest clothes.'The effect of this unexpectedly poetic observation was slight spoiled when Massot cleared his throat nosily and spat, but he wa...

It was a meal that we shall never forget; more accurately, it was several meals that we shall never forget, because it went beyond the gastronomic frontiers of anything we had ever experienced, both i...