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Fran Lebowitz

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Famous Fran Lebowitz Quotes

“Here's the problem. Here's what news used to be: information. That's what news is. Now, every article in the New York Times starts, no matter what it is, it starts with, "On a rocky road in Afghanistan..." It's like, three paragraphs 'til you get to "a bomb blew up something in Afghanistan." The bomb is the news, the beginning is the writing. Facts are what's important in news, but no one is interested in facts anymore. People are interested--and this I find astonishing--they're interested in other people's opinions. So, unbiased news, I don't think we'll have anymore, because no one seems to know what news is. They turn on the news and they watch people give their opinions. That's what they watch on TV, that's what they see on the Internet, that's what they participate in. Here's how I feel when someone on CNN says, "Here's our Twitter number whatever-you-call-it...we want to know what you think." And I think, "Really? I don't.”

Fran Lebowitz
Author:Fran Lebowitz
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“I think people have an obligation to show to the world things that are...not great, most people aren't capable of that--but better than most things people show to the world. Now people show everything. Every single thing. There's nothing wrong with it morally, but I wonder how--the people who have always done this who are young, who have always lived in this world--I wonder how they would judge anything. And since basically making distinctions is my profession, and judging is my profession, I don't think there's any people like me in a young generation, because they wouldn't be allowed to be like me [...] They're either incredibly critical in a kind of crazy way--"I hate your hairstyle, you should die"-- or they're incredibly overpraising -- "Oh, that's great. You're great. Keep going, you're great." I would basically say, "Your hairstyle, no one should be killed for your hairstyle, but your writing, stop. Don't keep going.”

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“When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.”

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“I have a real aversion to machines. I write with a pen. Then I read it to someone who writes it onto the computer. What are those computer letters made of anyway? Light? Too insubstantial. Paper, you can feel it. A pen. There's a connection. A pen goes exactly at your speed, whereas that machine jumps. And then, that machine is waiting for you, just humming "uh-huh, yes?”

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“The terrible state of public education has paid huge dividends in ignorance. Huge. We now have a country that can be told blatant lies - easily checkable, blatant lies - and I'm not talking about the covert workings of the CIA. When we have a terrorist attack, on September 11, 2001 with 19 men - 15 of them are Saudis - and five minutes later the whole country thinks they're from Iraq - how can you have faith in the public? This is an easily checkable fact. The whole country is like the O.J. Simpson jurors.”

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“We are all born with a rut radar. Mine is finely wired, a little oversensitive maybe. Perhaps just a bit hyperactive. Twenty steady boyfriends before turning 16, a new best friend 12 times a year, switched college majors every time I met someone who seemed exactly like the sort of person I really, really wanted to be. I'm not fickle. I'm just never there yet.”

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Book:Tales From A Broad: An Unreliable Memoir
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“The theater itself is so archaic and old fashioned, that it doesn't really matter to me whether it's on Avenue D or at the Helen Hayes Theater. What's the difference? It's still a very nostalgic form. Also, it means you're knowingly walking into a room where there's actors. I feel it's very embarrassing. Because, you know, they're right there. You always think like, they can see you, and I think it's mortifying, frankly, and I hate to sit near the front, where you feel they actually might see you. It's too ... it's too live.”

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“My other hobby, because I just love any job with a gavel, is auctioneer. And I so often have presided over charity auctions in New York that many years ago Sotheby's sent me my own gavel. Now, the Sotheby's gavel is infinitely more elegant--it came in a little velvet bag, with "Sotheby's" inscribed in gold. It hangs in my library. I feel that everyone has occasion to use a gavel at various times everyday, they just don't think of it.”

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“There's no such thing as advice to the lovelorn. If they took advice, they wouldn't be lovelorn. You see, advice and lovelorn don't go together. Because advice makes love sound like some sort of cognitive activity, but we know that it isn't. We all know that it's some sort of horrible chemical reaction over which we have absolutely no control. And that's why advice doesn't work.”

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“[Children are] like talking animals. Their consciousness is so different from ours that they constitute a different species. They don't have to be particularly interesting children; just the fact that they are children is sufficient. They don't know what anything is, so they have to make it up. No matter how dull they are, they still have to figure things out for themselves.”

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“Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.”

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