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
bears pounds literature
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.
writing thinking discovery
For me writing is foremost a mode of thinking and when it works well, an act of discovery
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.
thinking stories form
I think the story is my form.
married
I am married to someone I love.
clever writing arrows
I have myself always been terrified of plagiarism - of being accused of it, that is. Every writer is a thief, though some of us are more clever than others at disguising our robberies. The reason writers are such slow readers is that we are ceaselessly searching for things we can steal and then pass off as our own: a natty bit of syntax, a seamless transition, a metaphor that jumps to its target like an arrow shot from an aluminum crossbow.