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
two lunch phones
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.
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.
beer connected football male rest suppose
I suppose it's because beer is connected to football broadcasts and the rest of it. Beer . . . accompanies male activities.
bad good superior talk time
If superior talk is your idea of a good time it's (hell) not really such a bad place to end up
secret way speaking-french
By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.
reading small-numbers people
While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.
inspirational adrift realms
Within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
sloth knows know-how
I know how deeply slothful I am.
mistake genius sometimes
If geniuses can sometimes make mistakes, cannot the rest of us on occasion be geniuses?
inspirational dream man-of-my-dreams
What distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, and what we do to make them come about.
intelligent cheerful flow
We who are quotatious are never truly alone, but always hear the cheerful flow of remarks made by dead writers so much more intelligent than we.
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.