Fran Lebowitz People Quotations

When people say, 'Doesn't Gloria [Vanderbilt] look great? She's 85.' I say, 'Yes, she was a raving beauty when she was 20,' that's the key. Very helpful.

If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

I'm not a nervous person. I'm not afraid to be on TV. I'm only afraid when I write. When I'm at my desk I feel like most people would feel if they went on TV.

Forcing people into a situation where they're supposed to adore each other is probably bad. But letting people get on and off the 6 train without stabbing each other, that's good.

Now people need special costumes to ride bicycles. I mean, a helmet, what, are you an astronaut??

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.

When you reach a certain age, suddenly there are lots of people younger than you, which is really startling.

The Italians are the most civilized people. And they're very warm. Basically, they're Jews with great architecture.

In Rome people spend most of their time having lunch. And they do it very well - Rome is unquestionably the lunch capital of the world.

Being poor is like being a child. Being rich is like being an adult: you get to do whatever you want. Everyone is nice when they have to be; rich people are nice when they feel like it.

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.

You sit or stand in the subway, and you look around - I do, because I don't have a phone so I'm not playing a game - and you see people.

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

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

A great many people in Los Angeles are on special diets that restrict their intake of synthetic foods. The reason for this appears to be a widely held belief that organically grown fruits and vegetables make the cocaine work faster.

I just can't smile at people for money.

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.

I used to rent a house in Princeton, New Jersey, and whenever people came to visit me, I would drive them past Albert Einstein's house, which is the most ordinary house in Princeton - a house, let me assure you, that now a salesman wouldn't live in. I'd always say, "That was Albert Einstein's house." And they'd say, "What do you mean? Why would Albert Einstein live in a little house like that?" And I'd always say to people, "Because he didn't care!"

Communists all seem to wear small caps, a look I consider better suited to tubes of toothpaste than to people.

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.

Citizen's Band radio renders one accessible to a wide variety of people from all walks of life. It should not be forgotten that all walks of life include conceptual artists, dry cleaners, and living poets.

Even if people aren't Republicans, it doesn't seem shocking to them that Ronald Reagan was the president. Well of course, because Arnold Schwarzenegger was the governor! This is not only a bar too low, this is no bar at all. I don't care who you are, you know 20 people smarter than Ronald Reagan. You know 20 people who would be a better president than Ronald Reagan.

Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult. Many people find smoking objectionable. I myself find many - even more - things objectionable. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French, or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around enacting legislation and putting up signs.

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.

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.

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.

When I saw a phone on a plane for the first time, I panicked ... I thought people were going to call me.

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

People elect the President for reasons that have nothing to do with his ability to be president.

In a print interview, as you may or may not know, they [editors] can do whatever they want. And they do. This is why most people are more hesitant to do print, because they can change it, and they do change it. They even change things that are in quotation marks, which is a pet peeve of mine. I've said to numerous reporters, "Would you read me back my direct quotes?" And they always say no. They always say that's against the policy.

A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That's just self-righteousness -- incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic.

If people had gavels, there would be no wars. If every person in the world had a gavel and could bang it and get everyone's attention right away and make their displeasure known, I believe the level of actual violence in the world would just disappear to practically nothing.

Commercials and sometimes other guests - it's the down side of TV. Other people - it's the downside of life in general.

Life was certainly more entertaining when people were indulging their vices as opposed to going to meetings to indulge in a new vice: discussing their innermost thoughts in public.

Randomness scares people. Religion is a way to explain randomness.

When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.

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.

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.

This idea that people have to love and understand each other is absurd. It's not human nature.

If people don't hold grudges, it means they just don't care what people do.

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.

People (a group that in my opinion has always attracted an undue amount of attention) have often been likened to snowflakes. This analogy is meant to suggest that each is unique - no two alike. This is quite patently not the case. People, even at the current rate of inflation - in fact, people especially at the current rate of inflation - are quite simply a dime a dozen. And, I hasten to add, their only similarity to snowflakes resides in their invariably and lamentable tendency to turn, after a few warm days, to slush.

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.

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

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

Once you go outside your natural audience, there are tons of people that don't like you.

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.

While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.

In New York, people are very overbooked.You say, When do you want to have dinner? It's May. They say, What about October? And then they complain: Oh you can't believe how booked up I am.

What I can't be is monogamous. That tends to upset people. I just don't like domestic life.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

The first people who died of AIDS were artists. They were the most interesting people.

I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.