Quotes from Joseph Epstein

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

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.

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

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

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

I know how deeply slothful I am.

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

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.

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

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

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.

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

Many moons ago dictionaries of quotations may have been less needed than they are today. In those good/bad old days, people walked around with entire poems and all the Shakespearean soliloquies in their heads....

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

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

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 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 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."

We're a compulsive but amiable crew, those of us who feel, or have felt, the compulsion to re-record the bright thoughts of other men and women.

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.

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

The reason 'closure' is a cliche is that it is used too often, too imprecisely, and doesn't in any case reflect reality. In reality, such closure in broken friendships and much else in life is rarely achieved; only death brings closure and then not always for those still living.