Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Twenty-four-hour room service generally refers to the length of time that it takes for the club sandwich to arrive. This is indeeddisheartening, particularly when you’ve ordered scrambled eggs.”

— Fran Lebowitz

252. “I always make a big effort to make a distinction between what is actually worse or what is just worse about not being 21. Of course, it’s much worse not to be 21. This is a given. But there are things that are worse.”

— Fran Lebowitz

253. “Life is so absurd now that it is almost impossible to be a satirist in this era.”

— Fran Lebowitz

254. “American women think that clothes fit them if they can fit into them. But that’s not at all what fit means.”

— Fran Lebowitz

255. “Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq.”

— Fran Lebowitz

256. “It’s very important who the president of the United States is. America is a great idea, so that’s why it’s a great country.”

— Fran Lebowitz

257. “Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth.”

— Fran Lebowitz

258. “I always liked people who are older. Of course, every year it gets harder to find them.”

— Fran Lebowitz

259. “Do not elicit your child’s political opinions. He doesn’t know any more than you do.”

— Fran Lebowitz

260. “I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.”

— Fran Lebowitz

261. “There’s nothing like being old to be sure of everything.”

— Fran Lebowitz

262. “When I started publishing, I got offers to write for big magazines. But I would always say, “Well, it’s not that I don’t want to write for these big magazines, but you can’t edit it.””

— Fran Lebowitz

263. “Never judge a cover by its book.”

— Fran Lebowitz

264. “Luckily when you drive a cab there are two things: You don’t have a boss in the cab with you, and you are not facing the people that you are making money from.”

— Fran Lebowitz

265. “Never relinquish clothing to a hotel valet without first specifically telling him that you want it back.”

— Fran Lebowitz

266. “Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered.”

— Fran Lebowitz

267. “Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.”

— Fran Lebowitz

268. “People always say “pop culture.” As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from.”

— Fran Lebowitz

269. “I’m not a Communist. I’m an American. I’m a capitalist. I mean, I’m not a very good capitalist, myself. I’m not very good at it, but it’s not that I’m not for capitalism. But people who believe in things like corporate citizenship, it’s idiotic. I mean, it shows you’re an idiot.”

— Fran Lebowitz

270. “If you want to get ahead in this world get a lawyer – not a book.”

— Fran Lebowitz

271. “Inhabitants of underdeveloped nations and victims of natural disasters are the only people who have ever been happy to see soybeans.”

— Fran Lebowitz

272. “What starts love is your ability to stupefy and blind yourself to the point of being able to fall in love. What stops it is waking up.”

— Fran Lebowitz

273. “The downfall of most diets is that they restrict your intake of food.”

— Fran Lebowitz

274. “Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one.”

— Fran Lebowitz

275. “Communism requires of its adherents that they arise early and participate in a strenuous round of calisthenics. To someone who wishes that cigarettes came already lit the thought of such exertion at an hour when decent people are just nodding off is thoroughly abhorrent.”

— Fran Lebowitz

276. “I just write when fear overtakes me.”

— Fran Lebowitz

277. “In New York we have zillions of different kinds of people, many of them hate each other, but violence based on that hatred is really uncommon here.”

— Fran Lebowitz

278. “Most writers write too much. I have the exact opposite problem. I feel I could write almost anything in a paragraph. I have a natural ability to condense, and so I often think, “Are you kidding me? Five thousand words? How am I gonna make 5,000 words out of that?””

— Fran Lebowitz

279. “Wearing dark glasses at the breakfast table is socially acceptable only if you are legally blind or partaking of your morning meal out of doors during a total eclipse of the sun.”

— Fran Lebowitz

280. “Red is frequently associated with passion because it is the color of fire. Those who take this seriously need to be reminded there is such a thing as arson.”

— Fran Lebowitz

281. “Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the ’50s said it was going to be.”

— Fran Lebowitz

282. “New York’s not exactly antiseptic. It could be clean and less dangerous, and not horrible, not under a tidal wave of tourists.”

— Fran Lebowitz

283. “He allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that. It’s a shocking thing to realise people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives. The hatred – what is that about? It’s a fear of your own weakness.”

— Fran Lebowitz

284. “Writers get exactly the right amount of fame: just enough to get a good table in a restaurant but not enough so that people are constantly interrupting you while you’re eating dinner.”

— Fran Lebowitz

285. “You can’t go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.”

— Fran Lebowitz

286. “I’ve never had the experience of being edited and never will.”

— Fran Lebowitz

287. “Commercials and sometimes other guests – it’s the down side of TV. Other people – it’s the downside of life in general.”

— Fran Lebowitz

288. “All of television’s appalling, but this is hardly a new statement.”

— Fran Lebowitz

289. “But alas, I do not rule the world and that, I am afraid, is the story of my life – always a godmother, never a God.”

— Fran Lebowitz

290. “No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.”

— Fran Lebowitz

291. “Whenever I am doing anything else, which is most of the time, even if it is not something like robbing a bank, I feel felonious. Writing is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

— Fran Lebowitz

292. “You should make it hard on yourself to write so you’re easier to read.”

— Fran Lebowitz

293. “Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn’t look like Shirley Temple.”

— Fran Lebowitz

294. “Reading is better than life. Without reading, you’re stuck with life.”

— Fran Lebowitz

295. “People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this.”

— Fran Lebowitz

296. “Almost immediately upon entering the thirteenth year of life, a chubby little child becomes a big fat girl, and a boy previously spoken of as “small for his age” finds that he is, in reality, a boy who is short.”

— Fran Lebowitz

297. “Perhaps one of the more noteworthy trends of our time is the occupation of buildings accompanied by the taking of hostages. The perpetrators of these deeds are generally motivated by political grievance, social injustice, and the deeply felt desire to see how they look on TV.”

— Fran Lebowitz

298. “Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself.”

— Fran Lebowitz

299. “Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.”

— Fran Lebowitz

300. “I doubt there’s ever been a true thing said on Fox. Maybe the weather report, maybe not.”

— Fran Lebowitz