From the pen of Fran Lebowitz: -Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.- -The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.- -Humility is no substitute for a good personality.- -When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.- -If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.- -I do not believe in God.

I believe in cashmere.- From a woman who considers herself a lazy writer and who once said, -Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try, - comes this new volume, which brings back into print two of her most celebrated collections of essays. Written in the tradition of Dorothy Parker, Fran Lebowitz's hilariously acerbic Metropolitan Life and Social Studies are classics of their genre. In them Lebowitz does what she does best, caustically portraying the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life--its fads, trends, crazes, morals and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking and waggish, she is always wickedly entertaining.