Fran Lebowitz Quotes - Page 13

Luckily when you drive a cab there are two things: You don't have a boss in the cab with you, and you are not facing the people that you are making money from.

I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I've ever met: Every writer I've ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.

There were a zillion bad jobs. That doesn't exist any more. I mean, I could wake up one afternoon with zero money and know that by the end of the day, I would have money.

New York was always more expensive than any other place in the United States, but you could live in New York - and by New York, I mean Manhattan. Brooklyn was the borough of grandparents. We didn't live well. We lived in these horrible places. But you could live in New York. And you didn't have to think about money every second.

No one I knew talked about money. It's not an area of interest.

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

It is imperative when flying coach that you restrain any tendency toward the vividly imaginative. For although it may momentarily appear to be the case, it is not at all likely that the cabin is entirely inhabited by crying babies smoking inexpensive domestic cigars.

I'm very lazy, I hate to work.

Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I've ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It's very psychically wearing not to write - I mean if you're supposed to be writing.

In New York we have zillions of different kinds of people, many of them hate each other, but violence based on that hatred is really uncommon here.

The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.

In New York, people are very overbooked.You say, When do you want to have dinner? It's May. They say, What about October? And then they complain: Oh you can't believe how booked up I am.

I think writing for me has always been a matter of fear. Writing is fear and not writing is fear. I am afraid of writing and then I'm afraid of not writing.

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

Smoking is the great romance of my lifetime. If I could find someone I wanted forty-five times a day, perhaps I could stop.

My other hobby, because I just love any job with a gavel, is auctioneer. And I so often have presided over charity auctions in New York that many years ago Sotheby's sent me my own gavel. Now, the Sotheby's gavel is infinitely more elegant--it came in a little velvet bag, with "Sotheby's" inscribed in gold. It hangs in my library. I feel that everyone has occasion to use a gavel at various times everyday, they just don't think of it.

People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

There is nothing more mine than my writing, nothing I'm more proprietary about.

Forcing people into a situation where they're supposed to adore each other is probably bad. But letting people get on and off the 6 train without stabbing each other, that's good.

I never had a typewriter. I never had any machines.

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

I used to rent a house in Princeton, New Jersey, and whenever people came to visit me, I would drive them past Albert Einstein's house, which is the most ordinary house in Princeton - a house, let me assure you, that now a salesman wouldn't live in. I'd always say, "That was Albert Einstein's house." And they'd say, "What do you mean? Why would Albert Einstein live in a little house like that?" And I'd always say to people, "Because he didn't care!"

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

We live in a culture where everyone is perfectly willing to do this [to make a lot of money], and they're just looking for the opportunity. Obviously, a person who is really dumb is not gonna make a zillion dollars. But for a person who is really smart, really smart, it's a boring pursuit. It's not endlessly fascinating.