George Combe Quotes

I had a feeling about what I wanted to say, and I wasn't really qualified to discuss real things out of America because I didn't grow up there.

We do not understand these Americans who, like adolescents, always speak of sex, and who, like adolescents, all of a sudden have discovered that sex is good not only for procreating children.

In America many things that are interesting are seen as odd.

The British vice is overthinking before we speak, which is really annoying. I love the way that, in America, people are more straightforward.

You know why the French hate us so much? Thay gave us the croissant. And you know what we did with it? We turned it into our croissandwich, thank you very much.

I don't think I was very structured in that society and I don't really believe in personal success, which most Americans believe in.

There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.

I don't like American girls. They're very conceited, you know. In Europe they're more pleasant.

In England if something goes wrong--say, if one finds a skunk in the garden--he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift.

Willem tsk-tsks. "You Americans are so violent. I'm Dutch. The worst I will do is run her over with a bicycle.

Europeans have a different take [on nudity] than American actors do. They're not quite as hung up.

You know, we do a lot of complaining here in America. And that itself is something they can't do in a lot of other countries.

And what excites me most is the type of public, the fact that the Parisian people have a broader cultural understanding than many Americans do.

Why can't you just get married in Las Vegas like normal Americans?

A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.

All other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer and we are drinking Barry Manilow.

Obviously there are many, many ways of being an outsider, but having immigrant parents is one of them. For one thing, it makes you a translator: there are all kinds of things that American parents know about life in America ,and about being a kid in America, that non-American parents don't know, and in many cases it falls on the kid to tell them, and also to field questions from Americans about their parents' native country.

In a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut.

Americans understand better than the Europeans and the English that any publicity is good.

Go into a room where the shutters are always shut (in a sick-room or a bed-room there should never be shutters shut), and though the room be uninhabited-though the air has never been polluted by the breathing of human beings, you will observe a close, musty smell of corrupt air-of air unpurified by the effect of the sun's rays.

The custom of my grandfather's day is still going strong in Latin America. American girls do not seem to understand it.

Americans are an odd bunch, but they grow on you.

Most Americans have a sense of what the blues is. But in Hong Kong, they have no sense of the blues.

You cannot learn to curse like an American.

On his homesickness during the Barcelona Olympics -I miss America. I miss crime and murder. I miss Philadelphia. There hasn't been a brutal stabbing or anything here the last 24 hours. I've missed it.