Fran Lebowitz Quotes

Adventure upon all the tickets in the lottery, and you lose for certain; and the greater the number of your tickets the nearer your approach to this certainty.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

So it's probably eighty percent luck and twenty percent skill.

Success is like winning the sweepstakes or getting killed in an automobile crash. It always happens to somebody else.

Anybody can win - unless there happens to be a second entry.

When you make a bet, you're saying something.

I'm not a betting man.

I figure you have the same chance of winning the lottery whether you play or not.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

Life is a gamble, at terrible odds - if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.

If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave nether room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

As long as you're recording and they pay the fee, it's like a lottery ticket. You never stop trying.

The National Lottery is brilliant because when I'm on my way people tweet me and say: 'Fingers crossed,' 'make my numbers come up!' Which I obviously can't do but, what a great life!

We're really not going to get that much money out of a lottery for a small state like Alabama.

In those long-yardage situations, the percentages are low.

I know there are no guarantees of winning and the only thing we have is to work on chances. If you want guarantees buy a washing machine.

The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known - it's not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.

I guess if there weren't luck involved, I'd win 'em all.

There's no guarantee of winning, even if you are the best players and the best team.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Hope! fortune's cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!

Time to toss the dice

There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all.