I wanted to be an archaeologist. But in school you have to take a tremendous amount of statistics for that, and I am not good at statistics. So I hit a real wall with archaeology. It's probably like wanting to be an architect - you think it's all fun and games, and then you have to get out a calculator and you're done.
My A-number one visceral fear is speed. More than knives or snakes or confined spaces. Speed. I won't even go on a motor boat if I can help it.
I was pretty dorky, but there are tiers of dorkdom and I always had friends, though they were equally dorky. I was one of those kids who contracted cooties in the second grade and then had cooties, because there wasn't a vaccine for it. When I was around people, though, I generally wanted to make them laugh. I told a lot of stories.
I have nothing against Canada. I think that Canadians might know the secret to all existence, but to us it just comes off as timid and kind and too nice, and it strikes us as lacking edge. Unless you are hijacking someone and going on a reality show with your eight kids and wearing a velour pink pantsuit, then you have no edge to us.
I wouldn't want to live in Berlin. It's bombed out and there's a lot of techno.
I was surprised by how much I loved Portland. It is so wonderfully creative without being artsy. Great food scene.
I am starting to like LA, but the concept of a place you have to get used to so much seems a little weird to me. I have been to many foreign cities where I didn't have do acclimatize as much as I did to LA
I have come to understand myself as more of a New York writer, or more of a woman writer, but I don't feel like that while I'm writing. But I think that most New Yorkers would object to calling me a New Yorker. I didn't grow up here.
Book tours are such a little tapas meal of where I could live.
In New York and LA, there is sort of that silent competition to be on the cutting edge of something.
I felt like I wasn't doing justice to either side of my life. It wasn't pronounced. Publicity is an awkward thing to do. It is awkward to call people up all the time and ask them for things on a very basic level.
I think humor is the social use. You can put anything in it. I think - yes, I speak heavily in analogies - it is like putting the medicine in apple sauce or a block of cheese for a dog. Not that anyone in this room is a dog in this scenario.
Working on an essay versus a novel is like the difference between seeing to that curtain and seeing to New Jersey.
Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: