Fran Lebowitz Quotes

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

I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don't know won't hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.

Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast the disc jockey is not allowed to talk.

Think before you speak, read before you think.

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

Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.

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.

polite conversation is rarely either

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.

I am not the type of person who wants to go back to the land I am the type who wants to got back to the hotel.

Reading is better than life. Without reading, you're stuck with life.

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.

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?

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