Fran Lebowitz Quotes

I'm not my mother. And so I'm not raising my kids in the same way. I don't respond in the same way. We don't spend our days in the same way because I don't necessarily enjoy the same things she likes to do.

A lot of people ask questions that they don't want to answer themselves, and if we're honest about the intimacy that we have with our parents, you wish them the best and you wish them the worst more than anybody else in the world. I think everyone has had a moment in their life where they wished a parent ill, and I think it's perhaps a very romantic idea that that doesn't happen.

I think it's true about people now being closer to their parents, since the '60s, really. The parents are no longer from a different planet, the 1950s ideas of American family. We could be friends with our parents. After the '60s, it wasn't like a person smoking pot was what the parents would be appalled at.

If anybody comes up to you and says, My kid is a conservative - why is that? you say, Remember in the 60′s when we told you if you kept using drugs your kids would be mutants?

You're 25 and you're looking at adults of your parents' age and older saying, "I don't want to live that way," and this is how it happens. It evolves slowly and it's not the result of any movement. It's just young people look at the way their parents are living and if they don't like it they don't want to duplicate it.

I only get angry at my brothers and at my father.

I don't relate to that angst-y kid who hates their parents because they were horrible. It's just not my life and it's not the life of a lot of my friends.

Today's kids aren't taking up arms against their parents; they're too busy texting them.

Teenagers' relationships with their parents often aren't really explored in much depth, but at that age, it's your primary relationship; they're the people you live with.

I find that relationships between kids and parents are very interesting.

Isn't a kid alive who doesn't dream about rewarding her folks, or punishing them.

Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.

In family matters you can get over anything. That's one thing you'll learn as an adult. There's a lot you have to learn which is a lot worse than that. You'd never think of forgiving a friend for some of the things your parents did to you. But with friends it's different. Friends aren't the roll of the dice.

No one had ever said anything like that to Evie. Her parents always wanted to advise or instruct or command. They were good people, but they needed the world to bend to them, to fit into their order of things. Evie had never really quite fit, and when she tried, she’d just pop back out, like a doll squeezed into a too-small box.

Though energy and inspiration diminish, experience grows - the theme of parents and kids, for instance.

When you have a child yourself, you go back and think about how you were parented, how you were mothered and what your parents did for you, and you just want to be able to call and ask them.

I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.

Relations between parents and children and siblings and mates. This is not external. We can't separate them.

Are anybody's parents typical?

Have you ever noticed how parents can go from the most wonderful people in the world to totally embarrassing in three seconds?

I love my parents and they're wonderful people, but they were strict, and I still look for ways to get even. When I got my own apartment for the very first time and they came to stay with me for the weekend, I made them stay in separate bedrooms.

Our children give us the opportunity to become the parents we always wished we'd had.

Progress! Progress through everybody dying and their kids eventually not caring who their parents hated!

My music is in young people's lives because it's so much a part of their parents' lives.

I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.