Fran Lebowitz Quotes

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

You're only as good as your last haircut.

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

Life is something you do when you can’t get to sleep.

If your sexual fantasies were truly of interest to others, they would no longer be fantasies.

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.

Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries.

Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women it is merely a good excuse not to play football.

To me, nothing can be more important than giving children books, It's better to be giving books to children than drug treatment to them when they're 15 years old. Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?

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.<p>This hideous religion that’s all over the country — these huge church-malls — that’s what substitutes for these lost towns. But that’s not a town. That’s a cult. A town is diverse, in a real way, not in this fake way we have now. A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That’s just self-righteousness — incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic. People have become so rigid; their opinions seem to them like themselves. When that happens (and it has happened) people can’t change their minds. If you are identified by your opinions — if that is the very basis of yourself — how can you change your mind?

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

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.

I do not believe in God. I believe in cashmere.

Do not allow children to mix drinks. It is unseemly and they use too much vermouth.

There's no equivalent to Mozart in writing.