Mireille Guiliano quotes:

Being and working in America, it's very important to work hard, work smart and work in a certain way. France and Europe has, with the tradition and culture, it's slow-moving and it's not always good.

Make treating yourself a priority and always remember your life is happening now. Don't put off all your dreams and pleasures to another day. In any balanced personal definition of success there has to be a powerful element of living life in the present.

Intelligence, knowledge or experience are important and might get you a job, but strong communication skills are what will get you promoted.

Just as established products and brands need updating to stay alive and vibrant, you periodically need to refresh or reinvent yourself.

In America, you look at food as bad and guilty. In France, we love food and we enjoy food; food is pleasure.

I love my kitchen. For Manhattan, I have a rather decent-size kitchen, and it has an opening that gives out to the dining room, which has a window with a view of the city and in the distance the Statue of Liberty.

French women love to shop and prepare food. They love to talk about what they have bought and made. It's a deeply natural love, but one that is erased in many other cultures. Most French women learn it from their mothers, some from their fathers. But if your parents aren't French, you can still learn it yourself.

Once you have to start counting calories, it takes away from the joy of eating.

Scientifically, it has been proven that after three bites, your palate has been satisfied. It doesn't matter what you eat. So if you eat one boule of ice cream, that's all you need. You don't have to eat pint after pint after pint.

Expensive clothes with inappropriate or inexpensive shoes may send an unflattering message.

French women don't have too many clothes - a few good pieces that last for a while and are classic and timeless.

Women are smarter by basic instinct and by what we have to do to multitask at home and at work. My mother did that 50 years ago, but it wasn't called multitasking or stress back then. She had a job, two kids and the meals to make with no cook or maid. My father would come home every day and expect lunch. He was a nice guy, but he was clueless!

In the U.S., too many yogurts are filled with corn syrup, preservatives, artificial this and that. To me, this is poison.

Of course there are fat French women. There are fat people everywhere.

Learn to say no, with an eye to saying yes to something else.

Taking care of your mental and physical health is just as important as any career move or responsibility.

In France we have a saying, 'Joie de vivre,' which actually doesn't exist in the English language. It means looking at your life as something that is to be taken with great pleasure and enjoy it.

The word that I constantly hear out of women is 'fear.' It's almost like a background melody. Women have excellent degrees and experience, but we are afraid we aren't good enough because we have such high expectations.

I've never been ambitious.

The memory of some bottles can stay with your for life. While the wine doesn't have to be old and rare, a great old bottle can be like a time capsule, capturing in its flavors and aromas the time and place of its creation.

Since the pleasure of most foods is in the first few bites, eat one thing on your plate at a time, at least at the start of the meal when you can concentrate and enjoy the full flavors.

I am a believer in change peu a` peu (little by little) since drastic changes, including lots of changes made all at once, are often the sort of modifications that don't stick.

Wine is a living, breathing thing during its time in the bottle and in the glass. It is always changing, especially in the glass. A little oxygen can really open up and release the flavors in a complex wine, as well as mellow the rougher edge of immaturity.

Quality of life is very important in France. I have many friends who turned down promotions and more money because it would affect their quality of life as a couple or a mother.

There is no lasting glory in rapid weight loss.

I'm not a great consumer. I always ask myself, 'Do I really need that piece?' I have friends who have 300 pairs of shoes; how would you leave the house in the morning?

French women eat and serve what's in season, for maximum flavor and value, and know availability does not equal quality.

I would advocate that chocolate be covered by health insurance, but that is admittedly a very French public policy perspective.

We women are so judged by the way we dress, and men are not. So style is part of developing your own brand.

A meal that can be packed and frozen and thawed is nothing you should desire--much less teach your kids to want.

French women love bread and would never consider a life without carbs.

If you believe you can shed pounds quickly by force of will and deprivation, you will in all likelihood not only regain the ones you lost, but add a few more besides.

We only have one body, and you have to show respect for it.

I find it so unattractive when women wear sneakers with their business suits. I wear a nice pair of loafers or low-heeled pumps, and that's that.

People are unhappy when they are on diets, because it's 'don't do this, don't do that, do this, do that.'

French women don't eat Wonder Bread.

French women typically think about good things to eat. American women typically worry about bad things to eat.

Give us being and feeling over having any day.

I can never leave a bookstore without buying a book. I read four or five at a time.

I cannot live without flowers everywhere. I grew up having a big garden, the size of a city block, in Rombas.

Making choices that are meaningful to you is the essence of the French woman's secret.

My friends say everything I touch turns to gold. I'll say, 'I've been very lucky.

Nothing but beauty and douceur

Once a day, take some 'Beach Time.'

One does not laugh because one is happy; one is happy because one laughs.

People are unhappy when they are on diets, because it's 'don't do this, don't do that, do this, do that.

The real reason French women don't get fat is not genetic, but cultural, and if the French subjected themselves to the American extremes of eating and dieting, the obesity problem in France would be much worse than what has struck America.

When I grew up in France, I was a normal size. And then I came to the United States and I gained 20 pounds.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

You and I don't have the same genetics, we don't live in the same places, but we can have the same basic attitude - being comfortable in our skin.