Fran lebowitz quotes

Children ask better questions than adults. "May I have a cookie?" "Why is the sky blue?" and "What does a cow say?" are far more likely to elicit a cheerful response than "Where's your manuscript?" "Why haven't you called?" and "Who's your lawyer?"

No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.

Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have anything to add.

I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.

People are constantly telling me, whether they are friends who feel sorry for me, because I can't find a place to live, or real estate agents, "You can't afford an apartment the size you need with this many books. Why don't you just put some of your books in storage?" And I always say the same thing: "What if I told you I had four children? Would you say, 'You just can't afford to house four children. Why don't you just put two of them in storage?'" That's how I feel.

Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter.

Technological innovation has done great damage ... to eating habits. Food is now available in such unpleasant forms that one frequently finds smoking between courses to be an aid to digestion.

China is not a great idea: capitalism and a dictator. It's like the two worst possible things you could imagine together. It's a very bad idea.

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word "collectible" as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.

People elect the President for reasons that have nothing to do with his ability to be president.

It would also have been helpful to have gone to a Catholic grammar school. The only people who know grammar are those people who went to Catholic grammar school. Those nuns beat it into them.

remember this: no matter how politely or distinctly you ask a Parisian a question he will persist in answering you in French.

Being offended is a natural consequence of leaving the house.

They know you can't get people to stop smoking, so they develop a system of informants. That's the whole idea of second-hand smoke, you know. Make second-hand smoke dangerous and turn everybody against smokers. Then they say you can't even smoke in a bar - a bar! - because bartenders have a right to a smoke-free "workspace." Ah, bartenders, those health nuts.

Designer clothes worn by children are like snowsuits worn by adults. Few can carry it off successfully.

Tolerance is really a better thing than understanding. Because it doesn't agitate against human nature.

Breakfast cereals that come in the same colors as polyester leisure suits make oversleeping a virtue.

Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?

There is one thing that has disappeared, not just from the U.S. but from the entire world, is the idea of ever being embarrassed by anything.

Lifestyle. Not a word at all, really - rather a wordette. A genuine case of more is less. ... the word life and the word style are, except in rare cases (and chances are that you're not of them), mutually exclusive.

Violet will be a good color for hair at just about the same time that brunette becomes a good color for flowers.

You can be nasty when you are young, but you really have to be older to achieve bitterness.

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

The downfall of most diets is that they restrict your intake of food.

Telling someone he looks healthy isn't a compliment -- it's a second opinion.

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.

People (a group that in my opinion has always attracted an undue amount of attention) have often been likened to snowflakes. This analogy is meant to suggest that each is unique - no two alike. This is quite patently not the case. People, even at the current rate of inflation - in fact, people especially at the current rate of inflation - are quite simply a dime a dozen. And, I hasten to add, their only similarity to snowflakes resides in their invariably and lamentable tendency to turn, after a few warm days, to slush.

Your grandparents did not endure the indignities of a steerage journey to Ellis Island so that you could stand outside a discothèque and beg a wallpaper designer to take you in with him.

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

In fact, we live in a culture where intelligence, exceptional or not, is reviled.

Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.

If you don't have children and you don't have a job, you have time for friendship ... People who have jobs are not the best friends to have. It's better to be friends with people who are unemployed.

I believe that at birth everyone gets the capacity for a certain amount of drugs and alcohol, everyone the same, you can do it all between 15 and 19 like I did, or you can stretch it out over 70 years.

I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies - easily checkable, blatant lies - and I'm not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men - 15 of them are Saudis - and five minutes later the whole country thinks they're from Iraq - how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.

If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?

If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.

Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.

Polite conversation is rarely either.

Girls who put out are tramps. Girls who don't are ladies. This is, however, a rather archaic usage of the word. Should one of you boys happen upon a girl who doesn't put out, do not jump to the conclusion that you have found a lady. What you have probably found is a Lesbian.

When you reach a certain age, suddenly there are lots of people younger than you, which is really startling.

Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.

If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would pretty much be left with Let's Make a Deal.

Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth.

I'm not interested in being a wife. I'm interested in being an empress.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

You're only as good as your last haircut.

if you live in New York and you have a guest room, you have guests. So I think it's best not to have a guest room.

This idea that people have to love and understand each other is absurd. It's not human nature.

Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn't make up yourself - a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

My favorite animal is steak.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw. The second you meet someone that you're going to fall in love with you deliberately become a moron. You do this in order to fall in love, because it would be impossible to fall in love with any human being if you actually saw them for what they are.

Marriage entitles women to the protection of a strong man who will steady the stepladder while they paint the kitchen ceiling.

Spilling your guts is just exactly as charming as it sounds.

Inhabitants of underdeveloped nations and victims of natural disasters are the only people who have ever been happy to see soybeans.

Bread that must be sliced with an axe is bread that is too nourishing.

What do they do in these [private] clubs, anyway? Sit around saying things like 'Thank God I'm here. No Jews! What fun! This is living, huh? Look! No Jews! I don't know when I've had a better time. And no women! Just men! And no blacks! Just whites! White men! White men who are not Jewish! It doesn't get any better than this.' To some people, apparently, this is a perfect description of injustice. To me, this is a perfect description of a gay bar in Iceland.

A woman's quest in life should be to find the perfect apartment. And I have found the perfect apartment. The perfect apartment is the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum. With a sofa.

I am alternately very gregarious - very sociable - and then very solitary.

Life is so absurd now that it is almost impossible to be a satirist in this era.

Donald Trump is not my fault. You can blame certain things on me, but not Donald Trump.

I believe in talent. I know you're not supposed to believe in that anymore because you're supposed to believe if you just work hard you can do anything. That's how you succeed, maybe. But talent is something you're born with. You cannot acquire it by working hard, and you cannot lose it by lying around either.

I wouldn't say that I dislike the young. I'm simply not a fan of naïveté.

While clothes with pictures and/or writing on them are not entirely an invention of the modern age, they are an unpleasant indication of the general state of things. ... I mean, be realistic. If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.

People always say "pop culture." As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from.

People who get married because they're in love make a ridiculous mistake. It makes much more sense to marry your best friend. You like your best friend more than anyone you're ever going to be in love with. You dont choose your best friend because they have a cute nose.

Generally speaking, it is inhumane to detain a fleeting insight.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered.

If people don't hold grudges, it means they just don't care what people do.

Contrary to popular opinion, the hustle is not a new dance step - it is an old business procedure.

I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.

Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one's own interest in the topic has waned.

One of the big mistakes they made in Europe is that the circumstances in which you most frequently read or hear the word "race" or "racism" in Europe applies to Muslims. Which is not a race. It is a religion. You can convert to this. You cannot convert your race. I could become a Muslim. I could not become a Chinese person or a black person. So they constantly use that in Europe.

If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater suggest that he wear a tail.

While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.

What starts love is your ability to stupefy and blind yourself to the point of being able to fall in love. What stops it is waking up.

People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this.

I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.

That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires - smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge - are basically solitary pursuits.

Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq.

A salad is not a meal, it is a style.

All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.

You know, almost everyone is an irritant to me. I think people have forgotten what the word 'public' means. 'Public' means you're going to be irritated. It's a natural consequence of leaving one's home. You go outside, and there are people who are irritating. I'll be standing on the sidewalk, and someone berates me for smoking. I look at the person and think, but what about your shoes? How can you wear shoes like that and have the confidence to accost someone like me?

I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.

I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.

There's also the idea in this country [USA], it's not wholly new, but it's new in its kind of purity, in that you have to be really smart to be really rich. I always say to people, the reason people believe this is a) they've never met a really smart person, and b) they've never met a really rich person. I have met both, and I cannot see the crossover. You do not have to be a genius to get rich. You have to be ruthless to get rich.

There's nothing like being old to be sure of everything.

The 3 questions of greatest concern are:, 1) Is it attractive?, 2) Is it amusing?, 3) Does it know its place?

Even when America is not working that well, it still works better than other places.

The only appropriate response to the question, 'Can I be frank?' is, 'Yes, if I can be Barbara.

Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

I write so slowly, I could write with my own blood and not hurt myself.

Middle class was defined by having certain values and only a certain amount of money. But this new middle class seems to have absolutely no values and an unlimited amount of money.

I believe in talking behind peoples' backs. That way, they hear it more than once.

If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you've imagined. Venice is - Venice is better.

It's much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It's harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.

One of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously. My fashion advice, particularly to men wearing shorts: Ask yourself, 'Could I make a living modeling these shorts?' If the answer is no, then change your clothes. Put on a pair of pants.

Sleep is death without the responsibility.

I doubt there's ever been a true thing said on Fox. Maybe the weather report, maybe not.

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

Abandon the search for Truth; settle for a good fantasy

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

Humility is no substitute for a good personality.

The Italians are the most civilized people. And they're very warm. Basically, they're Jews with great architecture.

I think one manifestation of integrity is holding a grudge. Saying no is a little different. Holding a grudge is the modern equivalent of having standards.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter

I don't believe in anything you have to believe in.

Generally speaking, the poorer person summers where he winters.

There are too many books. The books are terrible. And this is because you have been taught to have self-esteem.