Top 300 Fran Lebowitz Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

259. “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

260. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

263. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

273. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

275. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

277. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

282. “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

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

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

— Fran Lebowitz

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

— Fran Lebowitz

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Do not approach with anything even resembling assurance a restaurant that moves.”

— Fran Lebowitz