Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I’ve always been old at heart.”

— Fran Lebowitz

252. “Scientists – the crowd that for dash and style make the general public look like the Bloomsbury set.”

— Fran Lebowitz

253. “Presently it appears that people are mainly concerned with being well rested. Those capable of uninterrupted sleep are much admired. Unconsciousness is in great demand. This is the day of the milligram.”

— Fran Lebowitz

254. “I don’t like to read nonfiction. To me, fact is something I can look up.”

— Fran Lebowitz

255. “I have the exact opposite problem of every writer I’ve ever met: Every writer I’ve ever met writes things that are too long, and they have to edit them down.”

— Fran Lebowitz

256. “When I was a kid, the people of my generation didn’t want to be writers, they wanted to be rock stars. Rock and roll was not just entertainment, it was the center of people’s lives. When I was young, it was exciting and interesting.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

258. “Things that people will say to me, mostly, is that you shouldn’t have all these books. It’s too expensive.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

260. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

262. “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

263. “Even when America is not working that well, it still works better than other places. F.”

— Fran Lebowitz

264. “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

265. “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

266. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

268. “People who are well-known, famous people, I think, make very poor characters for fiction. They make good characters for gossip columns. But not for fiction.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

272. “The thing you love right away, don’t do it, because that’s the very thing that’s going to be your addiction for the rest of your life.”

— Fran Lebowitz

273. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

284. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

287. “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

288. “When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree.”

— Fran Lebowitz

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

297. “I would not call it a writer’s block. A writer’s block to me is a temporary thing. A month, you know, six weeks. This was more a writer’s blockade. To me, this was very much like the Vietnam War. It was the same timetable, it was on the same schedule as the Vietnam War. I don’t know how I got into it and I couldn’t get out of it.”

— Fran Lebowitz

298. “If you must give your child lessons, send him to driving school. He is far more likely to end up owning a Datsun than he is a Stradivarius.”

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz