Fran Lebowitz Quotes - Page 10

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

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

Do not approach with anything even resembling assurance a restaurant that moves.

Being poor is like being a child. Being rich is like being an adult: you get to do whatever you want. Everyone is nice when they have to be; rich people are nice when they feel like it.

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.

Science has done absolutely nothing about noise. The worst design flaw in the human body is that you can't close your ears. The reason you can't close your ears is, if a lion was coming, you had to wake up. Today no lions are coming. Beeping trucks are coming. I read the other day that the guy who invented the beep when trucks go backward, he died. I thought: Of course - he dies, I have to listen to it.

The theater itself is so archaic and old fashioned, that it doesn't really matter to me whether it's on Avenue D or at the Helen Hayes Theater. What's the difference? It's still a very nostalgic form. Also, it means you're knowingly walking into a room where there's actors. I feel it's very embarrassing. Because, you know, they're right there. You always think like, they can see you, and I think it's mortifying, frankly, and I hate to sit near the front, where you feel they actually might see you. It's too ... it's too live.

When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn't want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people's lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.

Cold soup is a very tricky thing and it is a rare hostess who can carry it off. More often than not the dinner guest is left with the impression that had he only come a little earlier he could have gotten it while it was still hot.

I'm not a nervous person. I'm not afraid to be on TV. I'm only afraid when I write. When I'm at my desk I feel like most people would feel if they went on TV.

It's very important when making a friend to check and see if they have a private plane. People think a good personality trait in a friend is kindness or a sense of humor. No, in a friend a good personality trait is a Gulfstream.

New Yorkers, we've seen Donald Trump for, like, 30 years; we know who he is. So he wasn't a surprise to me.

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

I don't care if New York avoided bankruptcy by substituting tourism for the garment business.

We are all born with a rut radar. Mine is finely wired, a little oversensitive maybe. Perhaps just a bit hyperactive. Twenty steady boyfriends before turning 16, a new best friend 12 times a year, switched college majors every time I met someone who seemed exactly like the sort of person I really, really wanted to be. I'm not fickle. I'm just never there yet.

That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.

Scientists - the crowd that for dash and style make the general public look like the Bloomsbury set.

I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.

One [New York] eatery is a remodeled diner that looks like what Busby Berkeley would have done if only he hadn't had the money.

The other day I read that last year 58 million tourists came to New York ... where a puny eight million people are trying to live. Unless they own a hotel chain, I don't think a single one of these eight million people are happy about this.

A dog who thinks he is a man's best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer.

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

The effect of AIDS was like a war in a minute country. Like, in World War I, a whole generation of Englishmen died all at once. And with AIDS, a whole generation of gay men died practically all at once, within a couple of years.

When I was young, I liked romance. But to me, romance is the opposite of domestic life. I just don't want anyone in the apartment, not for longer than a few hours.

The good thing about being in someone else's apartment is it's so much easier to leave than it is to get someone out.