Quote

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.

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
Always
Laughing
People
Easier
Funny
Verge
Write
Solemn
Book
Cry
Writing
Laugh
Much
Harder
Make
Tears

More quotes by Fran Lebowitz

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Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here.
Fran Lebowitz
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Japanese food is very pretty and undoubtedly a suitable cuisine in Japan, which is largely populated by people of below average size. Hostesses hell-bent on serving such food to occidentals would be well advised to supplement it with something more substantial and to keep in mind that almost everybody likes french fries.
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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The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.
Fran Lebowitz
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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.
Fran Lebowitz
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If you're going to America, bring your own food.
Fran Lebowitz
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While clothes with pictures and/or writing on them are not entirely an invention of the modern age, they are an unpleasant indication of the general state of things. ... I mean, be realistic. If people don't want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?
Fran Lebowitz
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For the movie review columns, I always knew exactly what I was going to write about - the movies.
Fran Lebowitz
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I drank my lifetime supply of alcohol and I took my lifetime supply of drugs between the ages of 15 and 19.
Fran Lebowitz
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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
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All style is personal - that's what distinguishes it from fashion.
Fran Lebowitz
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Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.
Fran Lebowitz
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I hate, simply, to work. I just hate to work, period. I am profoundly slothful. Practically inert.
Fran Lebowitz
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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
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Writing pornography is deadly, nothing duller. I mean a toll-taker has a more exciting life than a pornographer.
Fran Lebowitz
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If there had been a job of being a reader, I would have taken that, because I love to read and I don't love to write. That would be blissful.
Fran Lebowitz
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I prefer dead writers because you don't run into them at parties.
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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Middle class was defined by having certain values and only a certain amount of money. But this new middle class seems to have absolutely no values and an unlimited amount of money.
Fran Lebowitz
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The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.
Fran Lebowitz