Fran Lebowitz Quotes

I'm terrible at relationships. I consider myself to be smart and a good mother but it's taken me this long to realise you don't have to marry a guy after three days or dump him.

Before Anna, I'd had a few relationships and I'm glad I've been around a bit. I know where it's gone wrong or know who are the wrong people for me and who I might be wrong for.

I think every time you go through a difficult relationship, you realize more and more about what you will and you won't have in your next relationship - what you deserve and what you don't deserve.

It won't work,' Mr. Bentley continued, sipping his tea. 'No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Don’t do what you know on a gut level to be the wrong thing to doI don’t think there’s a single dumbass thing I’ve done in my adult life that I didn’t know was a dumbass thing to do while I was doing it. Even when I justified it to myself—as I did every damn time—the truest part of me knew I was doing the wrong thing. Always. As the years pass, I’m learning how to better trust my gut and not do the wrong thing, but every so often I get a harsh reminder that I’ve still got work to do.

Now think deeply. What have you done with your life over the past year? How do you feel inside?

I am a much happier 27-year-old than I was at 20 years old. I am so fortunate because I have an amazing family, amazing friends and a great support system. I think at 27 it is much easier for me to look at life and appreciate what I have rather than stressing about the little things day to day.

I also think within the scene, a specific scene - if I were to play a part that I played 10 years ago now, my interpretation of that scene would be totally different. I would be making different choices. Because I can't somehow subtract all of the experiences that I've had in my life. And it's fascinating to see, because somewhere I'm very reflective in that. You know, I've been playing basically actually close to 40 years old, so I'm somewhere lost in age in this movie. But it's been fascinating to see that I can't subtract that time.

I think about Lenaya and Hugh. Will they know how much I've changed this year? Will they have changed too? I'll wait until tomorrow to find out. And then it's possible I won't find out after all. Because some changes happen deep down inside of you. And the truth is, only you know about them. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be.

I would like to think I will be a guy who knows when it's time to stop. I don't want to be a guy who hung on and hung on. I do not have a goal in mind of a year or a statistic.

When I had kids I sort of went into a hole for a few years and I think when I came out of that, I started to really become myself and know what works on me.

I found my mind has changed over the last years. Different vulnerabilities - things that I was never vulnerable to before I am now. And vice-versa. Things I was vulnerable to then are like water off a duck's back. I have a lot less fear. I think I'm getting more determined.

I think the thing about relationships is that you're always thinking "Oh, it's going to go bad." [...] But then, it's the same thing that all the silly magazines say, "Take time for yourselves. Go away."

Oh, I'm good. Seriously, after all these years, you'd think I would stop amazing myself. But here I am, still doing it.

For almost every character I've played in the 43 years I've been working as a professional actor, I've found parts of myself. We are all bipolar in the tiniest essence of what it is. We are all multiple personalities, in a sense, and to be healthy mentally, I think, learning what those multiple personalities are and inviting them in your life is really important.

I think all of us have our inner 13-year-old a lot closer to the surface than we're willing to admit even to ourselves.

When I was young, I had a list of things that I wanted in a husband. I knew what he should read and what sports he should like and blah, blah, blah. But the truth is, that the list was a shocking mirror image of me. You want to marry yourself when you are young. All the things you think are so urgently important, when you get older, you discover they don't have anything to do with love.

I've been in a relationship for almost two years now, so I'm kind of locked in there. My mind doesn't even really remember when I was single, to be honest.

I have always been in a relationship. I don't remember the time when I wasn't in one

And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature-the core me-essentially hasn’t changed all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel that same way I did when I woke up at the age of five.

You think you're developing and getting better and then you see something you did years ago. Looking at your early work.. sometimes it has a depth that surprises you.

I always think that I’m still this 13-year old boy that doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.

People will go to endless trouble to divorce one person and then marry someone who is exactly the same, except probably a bit poorer and a bit nastier. I don't think anybody learns anything.

There are a lot of guys who think that if they show weakness or vulnerability they're not sexy anymore or attractive. In my opinion, you can't be too open or too gentle or kind or sensitive. If you really want to work on a relationship and have one that lasts, you have to be willing to go deep into human psychology and emotion. If you don't want to go there, you can be a serial dater, and I guess that's okay, but if you want a relationship with a woman, you have to be introspective and look at yourself and your family and where you've been and where you're going.