When did you first come to Paris?
The first time I came to Paris was the winter of 1970. I had just arrived from Australia and it was my first port of call after London. My girlfriend at the time and I stayed at what was then a very cheap hotel in the Quartier Latin, the Hotel Europe, which first of all didn't even have a star, now it has three stars and they've got a shower in every room. The shower was at the end of the hall along with the toilet and you slept in a room that looked like for a long time had been part of a Parisian brothel. Everything was red fluff and the carpet was warm, turkey red and there was a little bidet behind a screen. It was an experience. I got to walk through the leaves in the Tuilleries and go to the Jeu de Paume and look at the Monet water lilies. And go to the Louvre and look at the Mona Lisa and eat cous cous and croissants in the morning and all the fun things that are now part of normal life.

When did you come back to stay and why?
I came back at the end of 1989, the beginning of 1990. I came back because I had met my present wife in Los Angeles. She is Parisian and it was, as they say a coup de foudre, a thunder clap, and when I woke up three weeks later I was in Paris, living on the Place Dauphine and my wife was pregnant three weeks later. I arrived in mid-December and our daughter was conceived in early January, in the middle of the most staggering hurricane in the history of France, which tore down almost every tree in the country. It was almost like a sign from heaven that this was an intelligent move.

Where do you live in Paris and why?
I live in the sixth arrondissement, on the Rue de L'Odéon, which is a little one-block street running between the Théatre de L'Odéon and the Boulevard St. Germain, just below the Luxembourg Gardens. We live in the building where Sylvia Beach used to live when she ran Shakespeare and Company. She lived in the apartment underneath us and Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and all the big names of the Les Années Folles used to come over for dinner, and presumably throw up on the stair carpet, which I don't think has been cleaned since.

What's your favorite time of the year in Paris?
Autumn, autumn is my favorite time of the year. As Verlaine said, "on the wings of regret my heart is carried". In fact October-November is probably the most evocative period in Paris. There is something about the gray skies, and the gray and pink sunset and sunrises, the wet cobbles, and the leafless trees. It's always what I thought of when I thought of Paris. My first visual memories of Paris are all from movies, which were always in black and white. My memories even precede the New Wave. I can remember seeing Claude Autant-Lara's La Blé en Herbe when I was just a teenager.

Back in Sydney?
Yes, back in Sydney. In those days it was called "The Game of Love," but back then almost all French movies were called the Game of Love. Being a great Colette story about the end of summer and a summer romance between a young man and an older woman it satisfied all those longings of an Australian teenager. But it was in black and white, and almost all the films were in black and white. And then the New Wave came and they couldn't afford color and they were in black and white as well, so for me I saw Paris in black and white long before I ever remembered it in color and it remained a movie Paris for me.

So you weren't influenced by Utrillo and Cailleboute and the Impressionists?
No, not at all. I did not discover French painting until I came here, until I could see all the Renoirs and the Seurats. I never saw those paintings except in reproduction, so to me it is very much a movie Paris.

No conversation about Paris would be complete without talking about food. What is your favorite market?
I shop in one of the best markets in Paris, which is the market on Rue Buci in the sixth (arrondissement). It is our local market and still one of the best markets in the world, I think.

You said "the best." What about it makes it the best?
Well, it's a market at an arrondissement where there is a lot of money, so the range of foods is very good. If you want really good meat or foie gras, you can buy it. If you want absolutely perfect girolles or cepes straight out of the forest, you can buy them. You can't find those in suburban markets because there is not a market for them. You will find sausage made of wild boar, you will find fresh pheasants, rabbit and deer and a very good range of wines, excellent breads, the sort of thing that doesn't necessarily appeal to the housewives in the banlieus (suburbs). Mind you, there are some suburban markets where if you want specialized things, yes, you should go. The Marché Aligre on Place d'Aligre is great because you can get a lot of fruits, spices, fresh herbs, cilantro in enormous quantities, good chilies, excellent cheap lamb, and what's more, there's a brocante market that's attached and you can then go and browse, so it's great. Also, Kremlin Bicetre is excellent - it's huge.

We'll come back to the food but you mention brocantes. Books and images are so much a part of life here, is there a particular place you like to shop for those, or is it just a case of turning the corner and seeing an image in a window and being drawn in? I remember last year you bought an image of Sarah Bernhardt.
It was a Nadar photograph. It just happened that we were walking by and I saw this image and I thought, this is great, and now it is in a permanent place in our living room (see the photo that accompanies this interview above).

Are there places that you like to go to shop?
I particularly like to go to the monthly book market on Place Monge. It's a relatively new market – it's only been in existence a year – but Place Monge is the most wonderful place up on the Rue Mouffetard – Hemingway's old stamping ground. And it sells entirely rare and collectible books. It is a wonderful place. Then I go to the bouquinistes on the Seine. Particularly the stretch that runs from Notre Dame, down past the Tour D'Argent almost all the way to the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bibliothèque de Gran Vitesse as it's known, the great big new bibliothéque, because that area is not so much browsed by the professionals. But then of course I go to brocantes all over Paris, during spring and summer, every little district has a Brocante where you find the most extraordinary things.

You are not opening a first growth Bordeaux everyday so when you and your wife are kicking back in the living room, what do you drink?
What do we drink with a cheese sandwich?. We have a house in the Charente, which is just north of the Medoc, so we buy a lot of wine at the Medoc. We sometimes go to the St. Emillion and Pomerol but for normal drinking we drink Bordeaux, and most of what we drink is red. We are not white wine drinkers. In America, a lot of people drink white wine but it never appealed to me too much.

Only with huitres (oysters)?
Even then, I'm so tired of Chardonnay. The French don't drink it at all, the French don't talk about varietals. They don't talk about the grape, they talk about the area. For us, for quotidian use we drink wine from two small villages in the center of the Medoc, called Pauillac and St. Estephe.

What is your favorite café?
For coffee I go to the Danton which is at the corner of Rue de L'Odéon. Well, it is a nice place, it's right at the corner so you get to watch everyone go by, and that Carrefour of L'Odéon and Boulevard St. Germain leads directly down to the Pont-Neuf and you are really seeing the whole world go by.

There are two great traditions in France: The bistro and the three-star restaurant. What are your favorites in these categories?
My favorite local place just for a meal is the Au Bon Saint Pourcain, and the best restaurant in Paris is Alain Passard's Arpege.

And what is it about Passard's cooking that is so extraordinary?
That it is so extraordinary. The menu de degustation is twelve courses. But no course is bigger than about two spoonfuls and the soup is the essence of five flavors that you don't remember ever tasting before. The pastry is of a delicacy and flakiness that just evaporates on the tongue and there are certain specialties, like tomato saveur, which no one else does or no one else has ever thought of. It is the most refined cooking I know. It reduces the whole question of eating to something other than a question of hunger. You are not there to satisfy your hunger, you are there to satisfy your need for new and unusual tastes and flavor. It's a tiny restaurant, about twelve tables and it takes about three months to get a reservation. There is no decoration except for pale wood walls, the Lalique glass sconces taken from the old carriages of the Orient Express and the enormous bouquet of flowers in the tiny entrée. Every patron has his or her own waiter.

And how many thousand franc notes would one evaporate for this meal?
You are thinking about, basic meal, 1500 francs, which is to say, two hundred dollars, with wine, another hundred dollars, so three hundred dollars a head.

What's your favorite museum in Paris?
The Musée D'Art Decoratif because all of the art deco is there. It's next to the Louvre. I don't go to the Louvre frequently, just for special exhibitions. I used to go to the Musee D'Arte Moderne when it was open but it is now closed for renovation. Anything that has 20th century art.

Is there a garden or park that you prefer?
The Jardin du Luxembourg any time of the year, I go up and take my daughter to school just on the other side and then walk back through the park, so each time you do it's a different sight. They keep changing the garden and they bring in all the flowers in the greenhouse in winter. It isn't like a garden where things die and come again. They cleanse the ground with steam to kill the weeds and bring in flowers already blooming, put them in and when that season's over they bring them out and they roll in the palms in the summer and the evergreens in winter and they bring on the lawn in rolls. It's like watching a set change.

how has Paris affected your work? Are you a different writer, a better writer?
Sure, infinitely so. When I lived in Los Angeles I was mainly a film journalist and so, a screenwriter. I used to write short stories. What I've written in the last ten years have been books about the cinema, books from the European perspective on the cinema, particularly American cinema, so I can write about Woody Allen in a totally different way than I would have in Los Angeles. So yes, it has changed my way of thinking completely.

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John Baxter is a renowned author, lecturer, film historian and commentator for the BBC. He is also the Dean of Faculty in Paris for Paris Through Expatriate Eyes and our guide to Paris in the twenties on our Paris Junkets..