Fran Lebowitz Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Polite conversation is rarely either.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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?"

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.

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

You're only as good as your last haircut.

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