Fran Lebowitz Cities Quotations

Nothing lasts. So it's my belief, yes, I know a lot of the things that we liked didn't last, but maybe things we don't like, they're also not going to last. There has been progress in my lifetime. There are certainly things that are better than when I was young, and there are things that are worse. New York City, it's worse. There's no question.

Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries.

Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here.

London: A place you go to get bronchitis.

Los Angeles is a large city-like area surrounding the Beverly Hills Hotel.

New York City is filled with the same kind of people I left New Jersey to get away from.

Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.

I am a New Yorker. I like New York. And I like cities. And it's not my desire to make New York more suburban. I would personally just like to vet each person.

I have a double policy, which would also solve immigration: I would stand at the border of New York City and I would say, "You can come here to live, but you can't come here to visit."

To me the biggest waste of time is commuting. First, there is no place that is less than a two-hour commute from New York. You can be half a mile outside of the city limits; you're two hours away by car. I don't care how close they tell you it is. "Oh, it's only thirty miles." Thirty miles? At 8:30 in the morning, thirty miles outside New York, you might as well be starting out in Omaha.