Joseph Epstein Quotes

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

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

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

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

I am not merely a habitual quoter but an incorrigible one. I am, I may as well face it, more quotatious than an old stock-market ticker-tape machine, except that you can't unplug me.

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

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

That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.

We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.

For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery

Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.

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.

Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.

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

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.

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

Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.

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.

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

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

One serious drawback about letters is that, in order to get them, one must send some out. When it comes to the mail, I feel it is better to receive than to give.

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.

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.

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.

We do choose how we shall live

Always seek the general and never quite trust it.

I think the story is my form.

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

I am married to someone I love.

I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.

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

I know how deeply slothful I am.

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

My wife who is non-Jewish regrets it all the time that I can say these terrible things about fellow Jews and she can't.

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.

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

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

There is no word equivalent to 'cuckold' for women.

It is difficult to be ambitious without also being envious.

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.

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

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.

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren't.

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

Vladimir Nabokov, contemning readers who "identified" with characters in fiction, remarked that the best readers identify with the artist.