Quote

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

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Fran Lebowitz
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: October 27
Author
Humorist
Journalist
Orator
Writer
Morristown
NJ
Frances Ann Lebowitz
Robert Paine Cook
Characters
Literature
Moral
Hope
Around
Sterling
Character
Hoping
People
Pretend

More quotes by Fran Lebowitz

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Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one.
Fran Lebowitz
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I have a hard time writing. Most writers have a hard time writing. I have a harder time than most because I'm lazier than most. I don't want to brag, but I'm the laziest person I have ever known.
Fran Lebowitz
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I walk a lot in New York, not for the exercise but to get from place to place, and because it's the way of having the least contact with human beings.
Fran Lebowitz
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London: A place you go to get bronchitis.
Fran Lebowitz
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I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?
Fran Lebowitz
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I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?
Fran Lebowitz
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Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.
Fran Lebowitz
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I hate writing. I will do anything to avoid it. The only way I could write less was if I was dead.
Fran Lebowitz
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The French probably invented the very notion of discretion. It's not that they feel that what you don't know won't hurt you they feel that what you don't know won't hurt them. To the French lying is simply talking.
Fran Lebowitz
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Any artist who has that quality of timelessness has that quality because they tell the truth.
Fran Lebowitz
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New Yorkers, we've seen Donald Trump for, like, 30 years we know who he is. So he wasn't a surprise to me.
Fran Lebowitz
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Because I was young, I had this long hair, and people used to try to tip me with joints.
Fran Lebowitz
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if you live in New York and you have a guest room, you have guests. So I think it's best not to have a guest room.
Fran Lebowitz
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It is imperative when flying coach that you restrain any tendency toward the vividly imaginative. For although it may momentarily appear to be the case, it is not at all likely that the cabin is entirely inhabited by crying babies smoking inexpensive domestic cigars.
Fran Lebowitz
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All style is personal - that's what distinguishes it from fashion.
Fran Lebowitz
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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
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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
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[On not reading newspapers:] If something important happens, your mother calls you.
Fran Lebowitz
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There are too many books. The books are terrible. And this is because you have been taught to have self-esteem.
Fran Lebowitz
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Without these tourists, New York would be fantastic. I don't want them to come. Stay home!
Fran Lebowitz