Fran Lebowitz Quotes - Page 4

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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