Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When I was young, boys didn’t type.”

— Fran Lebowitz

102. “Sleep is death without the responsibility.”

— Fran Lebowitz

103. “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

104. “To lose yourself in a book is the desire of the bookworm. I mean to be taken. That is my desire.”

— Fran Lebowitz

105. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

107. “The French probably invented the very notion of discretion. It’s not that they feel that what you don’t know won’t hurt you; they feel that what you don’t know won’t hurt them. To the French lying is simply talking.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

109. “Writing pornography is deadly, nothing duller. I mean a toll-taker has a more exciting life than a pornographer.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

111. “Bread that must be sliced with an axe is bread that is too nourishing.”

— Fran Lebowitz

112. “Nothing succeeds like address.”

— Fran Lebowitz

113. “Large, naked, raw carrots are acceptable as food only to those who live in hutches eagerly awaiting Easter.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

115. “The Word Lady: Most Often Used to Describe Someone You Wouldn’t Want to Talk to for Even Five Minutes.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

117. “To me the outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab.”

— Fran Lebowitz

118. “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.”

— Fran Lebowitz

119. “My favorite animal is steak.”

— Fran Lebowitz

120. “The truth is that most families have no smart ones and no pretty ones. Most families are a bunch of unattractive dopes. And it turns out that the Bush family, like most families, has no smart ones. I was not surprised to see this.”

— Fran Lebowitz

121. “Knowingness is sexy. The opposite of sexy is naivete.”

— Fran Lebowitz

122. “That which we call civilization is merely the accumulated debris of a chilling number of bad nights.”

— Fran Lebowitz

123. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

125. “My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.”

— Fran Lebowitz

126. “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.”

— Fran Lebowitz

127. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

129. “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

130. “Smoking is, as far as I’m concerned, the entire point of being an adult.”

— Fran Lebowitz

131. “I have a double policy, which would also solve immigration: I would stand at the border of New York City and I would say, “You can come here to live, but you can’t come here to visit.””

— Fran Lebowitz

132. “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

133. “That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires – smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge – are basically solitary pursuits.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

135. “Now the culture is made of old things, it’s a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You’re supposed to make art out of life.”

— Fran Lebowitz

136. “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

137. “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

138. “I drank my lifetime supply of alcohol and I took my lifetime supply of drugs between the ages of 15 and 19.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

140. “Polite conversation is rarely either.”

— Fran Lebowitz

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

144. “It is not true that there is dignity in all work. Some jobs are definitely better than others.”

— Fran Lebowitz

145. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

147. “Perhaps the least cheering statement ever made on the subject of art is that life imitates it.”

— Fran Lebowitz

148. “If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. Your life story would not make a good book. Do not even try.”

— Fran Lebowitz

149. “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

150. “Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered. It takes it out of you. It’s very psychically wearing not to write – I mean if you’re supposed to be writing.”

— Fran Lebowitz