Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 6 of 7

251. “I never would start writing before midnight and I would finish at, like, seven in the morning.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

253. “There are some short essays that are very grave, and most contemporary novels are lighter than air.”

— Fran Lebowitz

254. “Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around with royal-blue chickens.”

— Fran Lebowitz

255. “If I lived in another country, like a country that was, say, an enemy of the United States, I would be more amused than I am.”

— Fran Lebowitz

256. “If there were, say, only 10 percent of the hotels that exist now, there would be all these apartments for people who live in New York, as opposed to people visiting New York. And then all this junk in the theater, we would no longer need the kind of stuff that tourists like.”

— Fran Lebowitz

257. “Magazines all too frequently lead to books and should be regarded by the prudent as the heavy petting of literature.”

— Fran Lebowitz

258. “Because I was young, I had this long hair, and people used to try to tip me with joints.”

— Fran Lebowitz

259. “Breakfast cereals that come in the same colors as polyester leisure suits make oversleeping a virtue.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

261. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

264. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

274. “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

275. “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

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

279. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

282. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “Everything in Japan is hidden. Real life has an unlisted phone number.”

— Fran Lebowitz

290. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

294. “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

295. “Try to derive some comfort from the knowledge that if your guidance counselor were working up to his potential, he wouldn’t still be in high school.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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