"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." -- Joseph Epstein

Joseph Epstein (born January 9, 1937 in Chicago)is an essayist, short story writer, and editor, best known as a former editor of the Phi Beta Kappa Society's The American Scholar magazine and for his recent essay collection, Snobbery: The American Version. He was also a lecturer at Northwestern University from 1974 to 2002. He is a Contributing Editor at The Weekly Standard and a long-time contributor of essays and short stories to The New Criterion and Commentary. The late William F. Buckley, Jr., in his review of Snobbery, called Epstein the wittiest writer alive.

Epstein's body of work reveals his fascination with common everyday situations, amusing trends and small pleasures that he brings to his reader's attention. He also specializes in essays that shed light on the musings and ideas of famous and forgotten authors and writes short stories that prominently feature the city of Chicago and the characters that have populated his 70 years as an observer of the city.

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"By the way, the secret of speaking French is confidence. Whether you are right or wrong, you don't hesitate.""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.""Envy is never general, but always very particular - at least envy of the kind one feels strongly.""I am basically a complainer and all the grounds for complaint have been swept out from under me.""I am married to someone I love.""I am the heterosexual Truman Capote.""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 from the middle distance I give off the look of being prolific, which is a funny compliment to receive.""I know how deeply slothful I am.""I myself think anti-Semitism is about envy.""I should prefer to die laughing, and, on more than one occasion, thought I might.""I think the story is my form.""In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.""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.""No one has really ever defined what a friend is.""Not to like ice cream is to show oneself uninterested in food.""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.""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.""We know the ideal isn't where the action is."

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This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Joseph Epstein", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0

Total Books: 82

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Essay collections and books

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Essay collections and books

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