Joseph Epstein

No one has really ever defined what a friend is.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

I just know so many people who have six or seven foreign languages and have read everything and have musical training and they are still dorks.

I know how many days in which I have just answered e-mail, had three phone calls and a two hour lunch. Poof, gone. They are not infrequent.

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.

I am married to someone I love.

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

I know how deeply slothful I am.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

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

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.

The decisive moment in the defeat of upper class, capital-S, Society may have come when, in newspapers all over the nation, what used to be call the Society page was replaced by the Style section.

I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.

We know the ideal isn’t where the action is.

By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don’t hesitate.

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

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

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

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.

I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.

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

I think the story is my form.

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