Fran Lebowitz Quotes

Only he who attempts the absurd is capable of achieving the impossible.

The profoundly humorous writers are humorous because they are responsive to the hopeless, uncouth, concatenations of life.

Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

I know that it is impossible to talk about my work. And since it's impossible for me or anybody else to talk about my work, I feel I might as well talk about it.

L'absurde est la notion essentielle et la premie' re ve? rite? . The absurd is the fundamental idea and the first truth.

Absurdity is what I like most in life.

A hippo sandwich is easy to make. All you do is simply take one slice of bread, one slice of cake, some mayonnaise, one onion ring, one hippopotamus, one piece of string, a dash of pepper. That ought to do it. And now comes the problem... biting into it!

Why, did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail?" "Where would you find a beaver that big?" grumbled the Humbug as his pencil point snapped. "I'm sure I don't know," he replied, "but if you did, you'd certainly know what to do with him.

The modern world seems to make fun of people in a lot of ways.

Board the cows! We've come to enslave your marigolds.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Everything is absurd.

We have to be a little cautious about not trying to kill a gnat with an atom bomb. The performances are so utterly absurd regarding the "post-truth" moment that the proper response might best be ridicule.

If something's a little weird, it's Kafkaesque.

If sub specie aeternitatis [from eternity's point of view] there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.

Why wait for reasons to laugh? Life as it is should be reason enough to laugh. It is so absurd, it is so ridiculous. It is so beautiful, so wonderful! It is all sorts of things together. It is a great cosmic jokе.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.

Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent.

I don't know that you can do it as a satire. I mean, the business is crazy enough as it is. It's like doing Wag The Dog - we took a thing that was almost completely absurd on one level, and then ultimately those things came about.

There is no point in using the word 'impossible' to describe something that has clearly happened.

Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.