Joseph Epstein Quotes

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

A writer can get into a vast deal of trouble through misquotation. If you ever want to receive lots of mail, I recommend you get a Shakespeare quote wrong in a magazine or newspaper.

The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.

Getting rid of most of my personal library comported nicely with my longheld fantasy of traveling light, existing with minimal encumbrances, living simply. A fantasy it has always been, for the longr I have lived, the heavier has my equipage grown.

Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones.

We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.

I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said, 'You are what you eat,' but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

...that envy and a sense of injustice are not always that easily distinguished, let alone extricated, one from the other.

We know the ideal isn't where the action is.

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.

[Snobbishness] is the desire for what divides men and the inability to value what unites them.

One of the reasons that most literary artists are contemptuous of Sigmund Freud - whose thought Vladimir Nabokov once characterized as no more than private parts covered up by Greek myths - is that his extreme determinism is felt to be immensely untrue to the rich complexity of life, with its twists and turns and manifold surprises.

What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps mostof all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.

To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment ...

All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about ... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

I am married to someone I love.

I think the story is my form.

By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.

High standards generally
about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else
far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.

Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.

The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott notes that one of the signs of being cold today is that one knows what one doesn't have to know.

A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.

For reasons no one has yet explained, the Internet is at once riveting and a great killer of concentration.

The study of the past is the main portal through which culture is acquired.

Old people like to give good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples.

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it's always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.

Conservatives and those on the right are usually willing to settle for thinking themselves correct on political issues; those on the left have always needed to feel not so much that they are correct but that they are also good. Disagree with someone on the right and he is likely to think you obtuse, wrong, sentimental, foolish, a dope; disagree with someone one the left and he is more likely to think you selfish, cold-hearted, a sellout, evil-in league with the devil, he might say, if he didn't think religious terminology too coarse for our secular age. To this day one will hear of people who fell for Communism in a big way let off the hook because they were sincere; if one's heart is in the right place, nothing else matters, even if one's naive opinions made it easier for tyrants to murder millions.

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

While reading writers of great formulatory power - Henry James, Santayana, Proust - I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C'mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer's cramp while reading.

If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?

Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of the day ... could only be perpetrated in adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only ... Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.

That there are limitations to the Jewish response of humor when Jews today face murderous, humorless terrorists in the Middle East or the cowardly politicians of Europe seeking the votes of their increasingly Muslim electorates.

What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams ... and what we do to make them come about.

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.

I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single - and singular - piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.

We do choose how we shall live

I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.

Someone - Cyril Connolly? Ezra Pound? - once said that anything that can be read twice is literature; I would say that anything that bears saying twice is quotable.

I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.

The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.