Fran Lebowitz Quotes

Our vices are attempts to combine self-medication and enjoyment.

You know that we have a great variety of ways to gratify our own desires.

Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable.

People are not patient anymore.

I succumbed to hedonism.

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

People talk-- they sneer at escapism. Well, there are those of us who need it.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

People are very narcissistic. It's not all their fault. We live in a society where there is a magazine for you, a channel for you, a perfume for you.

I miss the days when faith was discussed in public and not the most intimate details of our personal lives.

...spend my time warring and whoring, that's what I was made for.

Most people wish they could erase suffering out of the dictionary. Today's culture of comfort and instant gratification has no patience for suffering - most people want to drug it, escape it, divorce it; do anything but live with it.

The way you set up for a sequel is by having a successful film. The focus is on making a successful film, and making a film that travels around the world, and that people enjoy and have fun with, and that people are able to escape with.

Ancient simplicity is gone...the people of today are satisfied with nothing but finery.

We are on a sexual binge in this country. ... One consequence of this binge is that while people now get into bed more readily and a lot more naturally than they once did, what happens there often seems less important.

Entertainment is all about helping people feel things that they might not have access to normally. They watch something and it makes them feel something, and that makes them reflective about their own life, you know?

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.

People are renovating places and opening ambitious new venues. That's one thing that music does. It gets people out of their houses, and gets them hanging out together.

We have a few things in common - smoking, drinking, and women. Photography just gets us out of the house. (To photographer Juergen Teller)

You're a superhero. Shut up and enjoy having superpowers. This makes me crazy. This is why the Marvel movies kick DC movies' asses right and left. Because, I'm not paying $15 for a movie to go watch people being morose about lives that are much more interesting and exciting than mine and they hate them. I'm paying my money to see people sort of revel in doing things that I can't do.

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts.

Well, people got attatched. Once you cut the umbilical cord they attatched to the other things. Sight, sound, sex, money, mirages, mothers, masturbation, murder, and Monday morning hangovers.

Singing a song, playing sports - anything that entertains, that takes people away from their own problems, is good.

The worse we treat people in this country, the more delicately we talk about them.