88 Quotes by Joseph Epstein

Those who consider themselves good teachers probably aren’t.

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.

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it’s always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.

Not everyone strives to be fashionable. I don’t, and I believe I succeed.

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.

And it is a good thing that many ideas have a relatively short shelf-life. Some because they are bad, even pernicious ideas: the Master Race, the class struggle, the Oedipus complex, and Socialism are four bad ideas with wretched consequences that come immediately to mind.

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.