Joseph Epstein Quotes
Most popular Joseph Epstein Quotes
Scratch a cynic and underneath, as often as not, you will find a dead idealist.
A form [of writing] that's like a pair of baggy pants into which nearly anyone and anything can fit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
