From a post a few years ago:
Paris: Learning About Independence
Here, even then, in my juvenile amateurship, I seemed to know something about perspective. The view is from the steps of the Eglise de la Madeleine, and looks all the way down to Place de la Concorde.
Paris became a perfect training ground where I learned to rely on my wits to understand the often confusing and contradictory worlds I would inhabit for the rest of my life. I learned to be independent in Paris, and to understand my surroundings based on my own deductions, childish and simplistic at first, usually through quiet observation, and more sophisticated in my later years, and, up to this day, through additional support from books and study.
I became an avid reader in Paris. Almost all my books were in English, although I went through phases of reading some French classics, mostly because of my school requirements or my holiday French Language immersion classes during our summer vacations in Paris. These texts included Jean Racine's Iphigenie, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Emile Zola's Therese Ranquin, Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, Marguerite Duras' Moderato Cantabile.
I also visited museums with regularity, skillfully weaving my way around the Louvre. I was never attracted to the more modern galleries since they confused me. Much later on, while studying film and photography, I realized that confusion, or distortion of reality, was their very purpose. I used my instinct to include things which I felt benefited me and to mercilessly discard those that didn't. I understood that time was not on my side, and indolence or bad judgment would cost me dearly.
That is a strategy I have kept all my life.