Joseph Epstein Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Joseph Epstein
Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones. Literarily, reading about food is more interesting than reading about sex.

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

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

Joseph Epstein
The essay seems to be thriving at the moment. This may just be because there are a number of people right now who are fairly good at writing this strange form. Then again, it may have something to do with the fact that fiction is losing some of its prestige, which is not something that pleases me.

Joseph Epstein
What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps most of 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.

Joseph Epstein
Then again, the relative success of the essay may also have something to do with the diminishing national attention span. These days one sees a novel of four hundred pages, sighs, and says, "There goes a week of my reading life.".

Joseph Epstein
Scratch a cynic and underneath, as often as not, you will find a dead idealist.

Joseph Epstein
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.

Joseph Epstein
Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds.... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.

Joseph Epstein
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.

Joseph Epstein
I don't have fixed opinions or views when I start to write; it's writing that forces them out of me.

Joseph Epstein
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.

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

Joseph Epstein
When I write an essay I don't set out to teach. I set out, usually, on a mission of self-discovery — to find out what I really think about a subject.

Joseph Epstein
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.

Joseph Epstein
Each manuscript laid on my desk was a carcass, to be stripped of its fat and gristle and made sufficiently presentable for the somewhat less than lustrous showcase in which it would eventually appear.

Joseph Epstein
La Rochefoucauld is an impressive character. While being deeply cynical in trying to get to the core of human nature, especially that part of human nature that most people would want to hide, he is also amused by the spectacle.

Joseph Epstein
The idea that there are good people and bad people is not the way to proceed in fiction. What you need to do is find an interest in all people.

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

Joseph Epstein
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.

Joseph Epstein
To play the role of sidekick, to accept the status of second banana, however substantial the rewards, nonetheless requires certain gifts of temperament: one must be prepared to subsume one's interest to those of another, to settle for less in the way of attention and glory and other of those prizes that men and women, in their well-advertised vanity, have always striven for. One must, in short, be ready to let go one's ego.

Joseph Epstein
American writing is not noted for cynicism; our country is founded on optimism. In a way, it won't quite do to be an American cynic.

Joseph Epstein
A form [of writing] that's like a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anyone and anything can fit.

Joseph Epstein
It may be natural to think that one has always arrived on the scene too late. You just get there, and you say, "What? The party's over?".

Joseph Epstein
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.

Joseph Epstein