I don't think France is a racist country, I really don't, but we do still have many problems with our immigrant past, and there's a shame that goes with that, that works both ways, in the host and in the post-immigrant generation.
I was literally the black sheep of the family, and there were definitely moments of discomfort while my grandmother was working through her racism.
We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which they should be freeing up for their children. Twentysomethings who can't afford to leave home and can't get jobs are attacked as aimless and immature.
The longest and most destructive party ever held is now into its fourth generation and still no one shows any signs of leaving. The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day. The planet over which they are floating is no longer the planet it was when they first started floating over it. It is in bad shape
There are things that you cannot talk to your mother and father about, there are things that you cannot talk to your children about.
Once your children are grown up and have children of their own, the problems are theirs and the less the older generation interferes the better.
The Boomers have modeled a set of bad habits, and one grand gesture is not going to unwind all those bad habits.
I do not agree with [Samuel P.] Huntington that the world has a clash of civilizations. The word has a clash of generations.
I never wanted my kids to feel about me the way I felt about him.
I have an uncle I no longer talk to because of a joke I made about my grandmother, who is his mother. He's an 80-year-old man upset about a woman who died 15 years ago.
Me and my mum didn't see eye-to-eye for a lot of years, and I've never really felt connected with my dad, because he wasn't there.
More than any other setting - more than battlefields or boardrooms or a spaceship headed for intergalactic travel - I'll put my money on the family to provide an endless source of comedy, tragedy and intrigue.
He doesn't translate well into our generation.
So what are we given? We're also given, my generation, the disillusionment of our parents.
Women often have a fraught relationship with their mothers, even though that's the most important relationship in their lives.
Cruel children, crying babies, All grow up as geese and gabies, Hated, as their age increases, By their nephews and their nieces.
The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away.
Raising children is an incredibly hard and risky business in which no cumulative wisdom is gained: each generation repeats the mistakes the previous one made.
It's sometimes comical to hear the younger generation ask their peers to repeat themselves.
As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.
There's innate competition, I think, between mothers and daughters - mine no more so than anyone else.
The baby boomers have dropped the ball on their burden of responsibility.
I hated my mom for not letting me play football as a kid. So when I have kids someday, I guarantee they'll never meet their grandmother.
One interviewer asked me: 'How do you feel that you've betrayed your father?' That wasn't really very cool.
