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
envy kind feels
Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.
art quality high-standards
High standards generally -- about workmanship and creation of objects, about what is owed in friendship, about the quality of art and much else -- far from being snobbish, are required to maintain decency in life.
believe views two
I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.
book people soul
I am afraid I am one of those people who continues to read in the hope of sometime discovering in a book a single—and singular—piece of wisdom so penetrating, so soul stirring, so utterly applicable to my own life as to make all the bad books I have read seem well worth the countless hours spent on them. My guess is that this wisdom, if it ever arrives, will do so in the form of a generalization.
truman
I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.
laughing might should
I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.
drinking wine beer
That wine drinking is more effete than beer drinking? No question.
defined
No one has really ever defined what a friend is.
thinking envy anti-semitism
I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.
giving important purpose
We do not choose to be born.We do not--most of us, choose to die, or the times or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live--Courageously or in cowardice, Honorably or dishonorably, With purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial. What makes us significant is what we DO, Or REFUSE TO DO. WE DECIDE and WE CHOOSE--and so we give definition to our lives.
reading sacred serious
The problem for me is that reading is, I won't say a sacred, but nevertheless a pretty serious act.
jobs cat animal
A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.
running nostalgia deeper
No nostalgia runs deeper than that for something one has never known and now cannot obtain.
fun envy sin
Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.