A Fran Lebowitz Sampler

Fran Lebowitz was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1950. In 1968, after attending a series of secondary schools without actually graduating, she moved to New York and took a succession of what she calls “cutesy” jobs—waitress, usher, cab driver—and began writing poetry and book and movie reviews. In 1978, after writing columns in Mademoiselle and Andy Warhol’s Interview, she published Metropolitan Life, a collection of biting, aphoristic commentary whose immediate success made her an overnight celebrity. Her second book, Social Studies, was published in 1981. Both are collected in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (1994). Few contemporary writers have cultivated a public persona as successfully—or as hilariously—as Fran Lebowitz. For decades she has occupied a unique cultural niche: part essayist, part urban oracle, part professional skeptic. Armed with a gift for concision and a distaste for sentimentality, she transforms annoyance into art. What distinguishes her from ordinary humorists is the seriousness beneath the wit: a clear-eyed understanding of vanity, pretension, boredom, and the endless absurdities of contemporary life:

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

A book is not supposed to be a mirror. It’s supposed to be a door.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.... I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. Sleep is death without the responsibility.

The best fame is a writer’s fame. It’s enough to get a table at a good restaurant, but not enough to get you interrupted when you eat.

I prefer dead writers because you don’t run into them at parties.

Favorite animal: steak.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it’s a pleasurable one. It’s a drug. It distorts reality, and that’s the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

I believe in talking behind people’s backs. That way, they hear it more than once.

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.

In the Soviet Union, Capitalism triumphed over Communism. In this country, Capitalism triumphed over Democracy.