88 Quotes by Joseph Epstein

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....

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

I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under 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.

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.

For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery

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

Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of the day...could only be perpetrated in adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only...Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.

We do choose how we shall live