Fran Lebowitz Quotes about Children

If thine enemy offend thee, give his child a drum.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

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.

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

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

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?"

One of the biggest changes in my lifetime, is the phenomenon of men wearing shorts. Men never wore shorts when I was young. This is one of the worst changes, by far. It's disgusting. To have to sit next to grown men on the subway in the summer, and they're wearing shorts? They look ridiculous, like children, and I can't take them seriously. My fashion advice, particularly to men wearing shorts: Ask yourself, 'Could I make a living modeling these shorts?' If the answer is no, then change your clothes. Put on a pair of pants.

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.

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.

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.

People are constantly telling me, whether they are friends who feel sorry for me, because I can't find a place to live, or real estate agents, "You can't afford an apartment the size you need with this many books. Why don't you just put some of your books in storage?" And I always say the same thing: "What if I told you I had four children? Would you say, 'You just can't afford to house four children. Why don't you just put two of them in storage?'" That's how I feel.

Don't bother discussing sex with small children. They rarely have anything to add.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

Take away a man's actual sense of manhood - which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children - and you've got to give them something else. And they did.

Anti-smoking sentiment has replaced middle-class morality entirely. The smoker has taken the place of the homosexual. Today you hear people say things about smokers that used to be said about homosexuals - they pollute the environment; you don't want them around your children.

[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.

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.

Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.

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

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.

I must take issue with the term 'a mere child,' for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

Any child who cannot do long division by himself does not deserve to smoke.

How do you know if your child is a writer? Your obstetrician holds his stethoscope to your abdomen and only hears excuses.

Never allow your child to call you by your first name. He hasn't known you long enough.