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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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Fran Lebowitz
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: October 27
Author
Humorist
Journalist
Orator
Writer
Morristown
NJ
Frances Ann Lebowitz
Robert Paine Cook
Esteem
Terrible
Taught
Books
Book
Self
Many

More quotes by Fran Lebowitz

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Take away a man's actual sense of manhood - which is conventionally based on the ability to work, to earn money, to be self-sufficient, to provide for children - and you've got to give them something else. And they did.
Fran Lebowitz
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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
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I wish that real estate were cheaper and clothes were more expensive.
Fran Lebowitz
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Children do not really need money. After all, they don't have to pay rent or send mailgrams.
Fran Lebowitz
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I never wanted to have any extra money, if it meant having to have any extra work.
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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There are some great writers who are great talkers, but there are more great writers who are not great talkers. People seem to think there is some connection between talking and writing, but I love to talk and if there were some connection between the two of them I would be the most prolific writer in the history of the world.
Fran Lebowitz
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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.
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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If you are a dog and your owner suggests that you wear a sweater suggest that he wear a tail.
Fran Lebowitz
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Humility is no substitute for a good personality.
Fran Lebowitz
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Once you go outside your natural audience, there are tons of people that don't like you.
Fran Lebowitz
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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
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When I'm supposed to be writing I clean my apartment, take my clothes to the laundry, get organized, make lists, do the dishes. I would never do a dish unless I had to write.
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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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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Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, and small people talk about wine.
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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Smoking is, if not my life, then at least my hobby. I love to smoke. Smoking is fun. Smoking is cool. Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult.
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