Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 7

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

156. “My favorite animal is steak.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

160. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

162. “Nothing succeeds like address.”

— Fran Lebowitz

163. “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

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

167. “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

168. “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

169. “Polite conversation is rarely either.”

— Fran Lebowitz

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

174. “For the movie review columns, I always knew exactly what I was going to write about – the movies.”

— Fran Lebowitz

175. “Raisins are a thing that lasts, they come in small boxes, and you always feel like eating raisins, even at six in the morning. A raisin is always an appropriate snack.”

— Fran Lebowitz

176. “To me, O’Hara is the real Fitzgerald.”

— Fran Lebowitz

177. “If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.”

— Fran Lebowitz

178. “It is imperative when flying coach that you restrain any tendency toward the vividly imaginative. For although it may momentarily appear to be the case, it is not at all likely that the cabin is entirely inhabited by crying babies smoking inexpensive domestic cigars.”

— Fran Lebowitz

179. “Telling someone he looks healthy isn’t a compliment – it’s a second opinion.”

— Fran Lebowitz

180. “It’s much easier to write a solemn book than a funny book. It’s harder to make people laugh than it is to make them cry. People are always on the verge of tears.”

— Fran Lebowitz

181. “My dream writing room would be the Imperial Library in Vienna.”

— Fran Lebowitz

182. “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

183. “My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.”

— Fran Lebowitz

184. “I drove a cab. But all the girls I knew when I was young who had to work – there were rich girls – but the ones who had to work were waitresses. Because you could always get shifts in a restaurant.”

— Fran Lebowitz

185. “To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.”

— Fran Lebowitz

186. “Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won’t feel like watching.”

— Fran Lebowitz

187. “A hobby is, of course, an abomination, as are all consuming interests and passions that do not lead directly to large, personal gain.”

— Fran Lebowitz

188. “I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?”

— Fran Lebowitz

189. “Will power is not telling anybody you quit smoking.”

— Fran Lebowitz

190. “Should you be a teenager blessed with uncommon good looks, document this state of affairs by the taking of photographs. It is the only way anyone will ever believe you in years to come.”

— Fran Lebowitz

191. “I think humor is warmer, and wit is colder. Wit is judgment, whereas humor invites some sort of response.”

— Fran Lebowitz

192. “Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

194. “Whenever someone accuses someone of being a racist – which is rare, you have to admit, considering how much racism there is – there is an incredible outrage. I realized that we live in an environment that it seems to be worse to call someone a racist than to be one.”

— Fran Lebowitz

195. “Andy Warhol made fame more famous.”

— Fran Lebowitz

196. “Scientists are rarely to be counted among the fun people. Awkward at parties, shy with strangers, deficient in irony – they have had no choice but to turn their attention to the close study of everyday objects.”

— Fran Lebowitz

Featured in: Fun Quotes

197. “All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal. It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It’s much more relaxing to actually write.”

— Fran Lebowitz

198. “In fact, we live in a culture where intelligence, exceptional or not, is reviled.”

— Fran Lebowitz

199. “What I can’t be is monogamous. That tends to upset people. I just don’t like domestic life.”

— Fran Lebowitz

200. “Writing is so hard. Why would you be a writer if you weren’t really good at it? If you could be anything else, why would you be a writer?”

— Fran Lebowitz