Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?”

— Fran Lebowitz

52. “I’m a horrible girlfriend. I always was. I’m great at the beginning, because I can be very romantic.”

— Fran Lebowitz

53. “Generally speaking, the poorer person summers where he winters.”

— Fran Lebowitz

54. “London: A place you go to get bronchitis.”

— Fran Lebowitz

55. “There’s no such thing as advice to the lovelorn. If they took advice, they wouldn’t be lovelorn.”

— Fran Lebowitz

56. “The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.”

— Fran Lebowitz

57. “A dog who thinks he is a man’s best friend is a dog who obviously has never met a tax lawyer.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

59. “When someone asks, ‘Why do you think he’s not calling me?’ there’s always one answer – ‘He’s not interested.’ There’s not ever any other answer.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

62. “People elect the President for reasons that have nothing to do with his ability to be president.”

— Fran Lebowitz

63. “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.”

— Fran Lebowitz

64. “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.”

— Fran Lebowitz

65. “The best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.”

— Fran Lebowitz

66. “Do not have your child’s hair cut by a real hairdresser in a real hairdressing salon. He is, at this point, far too short to be exposed to contempt.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

68. “All style is personal – that’s what distinguishes it from fashion.”

— Fran Lebowitz

69. “Sleep is death without the responsibility.”

— Fran Lebowitz

70. “By the time everyone catches up with you, you’re bored.”

— Fran Lebowitz

71. “When I was young, boys didn’t type.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

73. “A great many people in Los Angeles are on special diets that restrict their intake of synthetic foods. The reason for this appears to be a widely held belief that organically grown fruits and vegetables make the cocaine work faster.”

— Fran Lebowitz

74. “I just can’t smile at people for money.”

— Fran Lebowitz

75. “Children do not really need money. After all, they don’t have to pay rent or send mailgrams.”

— Fran Lebowitz

76. “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.”

— Fran Lebowitz

77. “I’ve done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.”

— Fran Lebowitz

78. “Once you go outside your natural audience, there are tons of people that don’t like you.”

— Fran Lebowitz

79. “Your responsibility as a parent is never great as the case is with the mother.”

— Fran Lebowitz

80. “I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.”

— Fran Lebowitz

81. “You don’t have to lay an egg to know if it tastes good.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

83. “You sit or stand in the subway, and you look around – I do, because I don’t have a phone so I’m not playing a game – and you see people.”

— Fran Lebowitz

84. “When I fly, I’m never afraid the plane is going to crash. But there have often been times when I was afraid it wouldn’t crash. I was just afraid it was going to circle O’Hare for the rest of my life.”

— Fran Lebowitz

85. “If people had gavels, there would be no wars. If every person in the world had a gavel and could bang it and get everyone’s attention right away and make their displeasure known, I believe the level of actual violence in the world would just disappear to practically nothing.”

— Fran Lebowitz

86. “Middle class was defined by having certain values and only a certain amount of money. But this new middle class seems to have absolutely no values and an unlimited amount of money.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

88. “If you feel the urge to write, just lie down and read a book: it will pass.”

— Fran Lebowitz

89. “Smoking is the great romance of my lifetime. If I could find someone I wanted forty-five times a day, perhaps I could stop.”

— Fran Lebowitz

Featured in: Romance Quotes

90. “If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater suggest that he wear a tail.”

— Fran Lebowitz

91. “If food did not exist it would be well-nigh impossible to get certain types off the phone, as one would be unable to say, ‘Look, I’ve got to run but let’s have dinner sometime soon.’”

— Fran Lebowitz

92. “There were a zillion bad jobs. That doesn’t exist any more. I mean, I could wake up one afternoon with zero money and know that by the end of the day, I would have money.”

— Fran Lebowitz

93. “Civilised adults do not take apple juice with dinner.”

— Fran Lebowitz

94. “No one’s supposed to be the president. This is not England. And it’s not just the Bush family, all families designate each child as having some particular trait.”

— Fran Lebowitz

95. “Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.”

— Fran Lebowitz

96. “What’s the point of being young if you’re not going to make new things, I wonder?”

— Fran Lebowitz

97. “When I’m supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.”

— Fran Lebowitz

98. “New York was always more expensive than the other places, even when it was going bankrupt. In other words, in 1971, New York was expensive for someone with no money. For anyone.”

— Fran Lebowitz

99. “Life was certainly more entertaining when people were indulging their vices as opposed to going to meetings to indulge in a new vice: discussing their innermost thoughts in public.”

— Fran Lebowitz

100. “If, while watching the sun set on a used-car lot in Los Angeles, you are struck by the parallels between this image and the inevitable fate of humanity, do not, under any circumstances, write it down.”

— Fran Lebowitz