Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein
Joseph Epstein, also known as Colonel Gilles and as Joseph Andrej, was a Polish-born Jewish communist activist and a French Resistance leader during World War II. He was executed by the Germans...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth9 January 1937
CountryUnited States of America
may faces tape
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.
moon people may
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....
pleasure jew anti-semitism
One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.
complainers complaints has-beens
I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.
magazines want mail
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.
distance giving looks
I know from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.
fashion real hunting
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
trust never-quit
Always seek the general and never quite trust it.
safe boring chiefs
Generalization, especially risky generalization, is one of the chief methods by which knowledge proceeds... Safe generalizations are usually rather boring. Delete that "usually rather." Safe generalizations are quite boring.
breathing-space aggravation absence
What, really, is wanted from a neighborhood? Convenience, certainly, an absence of major aggravation, to be sure. But perhaps mostof all, ideally, what is wanted is a comfortable background, a breathing space of intermission between the intensities of private life and the calculations of public life.
waiting conversation application
The best joke-tellers are those who have the patience to wait for conversation to come around to the point where the jokes in their repertoire have application.
sex possibility variety
Food has it over sex for variety. Hedonistically, gustatory possibilities are much broader than copulatory ones.
class style may
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.