Richard Klein first started coming to Paris as a teenager from a small town in Pennsylvania, and has essentially constructed an entire life around the feeling that he got in Paris. He went on to become a scholar and a professor in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University, author of several books, Eat Fat and Cigarettes Are Sublime, which are deeply suffused with a sensibility that is partly just un-American, or anyway, semi-Parisian, a sensibility that is all about the small pleasures of everyday life.
Richard Klein: "You know, the French have a much more uncomplicated and much less guilty relationship to their body, beginning with eating, not only the way they eat, but the pleasure that they take in eating. I mean, the American notion that food is medicine, for example, is totally repulsive to the French. And yet, increasingly in America, that's all you hear. I mean, people eat only as a function of what they think is good for them. And nobody in France would eat strictly as a function of what was good for them."
from This American Life 165: Americans In Paris
