Fran Lebowitz Quotes

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.

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

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.

If in addition to being physically unattractive you find that you do not get along well with others, do not under any circumstances attempt to alleviate this situation by developing an interesting personality. An interesting personality, is, in an adult, insufferable. In a teenager it is frequently punishable by law.

I hate money. It is boring and it is arithmetic. The two things I hate the most.

I don't like the kind of country living where you have to help. I like country living where there is help.

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

Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren't really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?

The main symptom of falling in love is that you lose your intellectual prowess.

New York's not exactly antiseptic. It could be clean and less dangerous, and not horrible, not under a tidal wave of tourists.

Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time.

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

To me, the main difference between young people now and the people I was young with isn't so much style, it's the relationships they have with their parents. Their parents like them much more than ours liked us. Our parents weren't our friends. But now I see my friends on the phones with their, what, 30 - year - old kids? And they're talking about feelings.

Communism requires of its adherents that they arise early and participate in a strenuous round of calisthenics. To someone who wishes that cigarettes came already lit the thought of such exertion at an hour when decent people are just nodding off is thoroughly abhorrent.

Children are much less annoying [than adults] and they never start trends.

The truth is that most families have no smart ones and no pretty ones. Most families are a bunch of unattractive dopes. And it turns out that the Bush family, like most families, has no smart ones. I was not surprised to see this.

There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.

When I fly, I'm never afraid the plane is going to crash. But there have often been times when I was afraid it wouldn't crash. I was just afraid it was going to circle O'Hare for the rest of my life.

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.

Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.

I wish that real estate were cheaper and clothes were more expensive.

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

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

A great many people in Los Angeles are on special diets that restrict their intake of synthetic foods. The reason for this appears to be a widely held belief that organically grown fruits and vegetables make the cocaine work faster.

To me the outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.

Because I was young, I had this long hair, and people used to try to tip me with joints.

I don't like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.

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.

If you're going to America, bring your own food.

Frenchman: Germans with good food.

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

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one.

My dream writing room would be the Imperial Library in Vienna.

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 hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert.

I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it's not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work.

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

If there were, say, only 10 percent of the hotels that exist now, there would be all these apartments for people who live in New York, as opposed to people visiting New York. And then all this junk in the theater, we would no longer need the kind of stuff that tourists like.

...I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey.

Children are the most desirable opponents at scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.

I've never had the experience of being edited and never will.

Children are rarely in the position to lend one a truly interesting sum of money. There are, however, exceptions, and such children are an excellent addition to any party.

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

To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

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.

If you want to get ahead in this world get a lawyer -- not a book.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.

It is not true that there is dignity in all work. Some jobs are definitely better than others.