Fran Lebowitz always speaks her mind as a quintessential New Yorker, by way of Morristown

Brusque, funny, opinionated, inner-directed. Liberal to the last degree in the abstract — but intolerant as Torquemada when some slowpoke is clogging traffic on the sidewalk.

That's the genus New Yorker — species Manhattanite. Has been, since the days of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley. And it describes, equally, their closest living relative: humorist Fran Lebowitz.

She's the kind of person people mean, when they either say they love or hate New Yorkers.

And she's the kind of person that people who want to be New Yorkers want to be.

"I don't care if other people don't like New York," said Lebowitz. "You want to live on a farm, live on a farm. You want to live in the suburbs, live in the suburbs. There's a number of things I like about New York. It doesn't mean other people have to like them."

Lots of people do, though. She knows, because they stop her in the streets.

Often they're young people, in their twenties. And they've romanticized the New York of her youth — the gritty '70s New York of CBGB, of artists in SoHo, graffiti on the subways and porn in Times Square, of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith and David Johansen. She knew a lot of the celebrated people, went to a lot of the famous places. And she's mystified.

"They stop me and say, 'Oh I wish I had lived in New York in the '70s, it seems like so much fun,' " said Lebowitz, 72. "New York in the 70s is now cemented in people's minds like Paris in the '20s. It's this incredibly romanticized era. And I think this will certainly continue during my lifetime, which you know, could be a matter of months."

Talking the talk

So she sets them straight. She's been setting everybody straight for the last 40 years, in books like "Metropolitan Life" (1978) and "Social Studies" (1981), and latterly — her writer's block is the most celebrated case of its kind since J.D. Salinger — in public lectures. She'll be at the Shea Center for Performing Arts, William Paterson University, Wayne, 7:30 p.m. Wed. Feb. 22, as part of its Distinguished Lecturer series.

"At least the landscape is familiar," said Lebowitz, who escaped the Jersey suburbs 50 years ago and hasn't looked back. Though she's been back, from time to time. Morristown was home, once upon a time.

"The town I grew up in was a very nice town," she said. "But I went to New York often when I was a kid, and once I got to be 12 or 13, I always said, 'When I grow up I want to live in New York.' Because it was very exciting. I basically thought when I moved here, I would be living in the Museum of Modern Art. Which of course did not work out."

In addition to books and lectures, Lebowitz has also made her musings known in documentaries like Martin Scorsese's "Public Speaking" (2010) for HBO, and the Netflix series, also directed by Scorsese, called "Pretend It's a City" (2021). The two have been friends since the 1980s.

"Neither Marty or I remember when we met or where we met," she said. "We just assume it was at a party, because where else would I have met him? I've been to many more parties than Marty has — which is why Marty has made many more movies than I've written books."

Her own feeling about the New York of her youth: it was great. Because youth is great.

"I was in my twenties in the '70s," she said. "So it's fun to be in your twenties, period. If you don't have fun in your twenties, you're never going to have fun. Life does not get more and more fun. I know that when I was in my twenties, I didn't stop old people in the street and say, 'I wish I was in New York in the '30s.' It's better to be in your twenties in the '70s than it is to be in your seventies in the '20s, I can tell you that."

The touristy, cleaned-up Manhattan of today looks a lot different than the grungy city of 50 years ago. And it smells different.

The latest addition to the city ambience: a cloud of marijuana smoke, in the wake of legalization, that has settled over much of the downtown.

"The entire city reeks of weed," she said "I'm rare these days — I don't care what people do. Do whatever you want, I don't care. What bothers me, as a cigarette smoker, is the idea that cigarette smoke is bad. All other smoke is delightful. Smoke from marijuana, smoke from barbecues, from fireplaces, from burning buildings. That smoke is actually healthful. That does bother me. You shouldn't run things by what you personally like."

Straight outta Morristown

Smoking is one of several habits that got her into trouble in Morristown.

She was expelled from a private girls' establishment, The Wilson School (now gone) for her supposedly bad attitude. She was suspended several times from Morristown High.

"I got caught skipping the prep rally on Friday," she said "Pep was mandatory for the football game which was the following day. I got suspended for that. I got suspended for smoking. You were allowed to smoke, by the way, outside of school. But you couldn't smoke in the bathroom, which is what many, many people did. And teachers could smoke. The teacher's lounge, smoke was billowing out the door."

So she never graduated. For which her parents never forgave her. But she did self-educate.

As a teen, seeing James Baldwin on TV, she was fascinated by the notion of the public intellectual. Another reason to love New York. "I had never heard anyone talk like that," she said. "I was mesmerized. The next day I went to the library and got one of his books."

Baldwin, Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Lionel Trilling, were part of a whole intellectual culture that was was one of the glories of New York. Many were children of immigrants and the poor, who took advantage of the many resources then available to the less well off: settlement houses, night classes, City College of New York (then free). The city itself reaped the rewards, Lebowitz said. There's nothing like that now.

"Having these city colleges free, which they are not free anymore, was a really important thing," she said. "I pay a huge amount of taxes, living in New York. The city spends a fortune on the most ridiculous things you can imagine. Spend my money on this. It really helps the whole culture."

Certainly it couldn't make the culture any worse. Like many of us, Lebowitz is astounded by America's drift into ignorance, hatred, and fear-mongering over the last 20 years.

Whether the Internet caused it, or merely accelerated its progress, is hard for her to say. She herself doesn't use it.

"I'm sure the Internet is a wonderful thing in many ways," she said. "But one of the bad things it does is connect a lot of people that, before the Internet, would have just been by themselves being lunatics. If someone is just a lunatic in their room, or a lunatic in their town, society can absorb it pretty easily. But if all the lunatics connect up, it can be very dangerous.

"Politics in this country, domestic politics, is horrible. Trump has made politics this awful kind of blood sport. I'm not saying that all people in politics before Trump were delightful. They were not. There were always bigots. There were always racists. But there are periods where you are allowed to be that, by which I mean publicly. And periods where you have to shut up. So we're in a period where nobody shuts up."

How many likes?

Has the Internet affected other kinds of human relationships as well? Friendship is something Lebowitz values: Scorsese, Toni Morrison, Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe have been some of hers, over the years. Part of what makes any great city vibrant is those get-togethers in cafes and parties where friends meet friends over wine, coffee, and — yes — cigarettes, and talk till dawn.

Friendship, in the Internet culture, has become something else. When people say "friend" now, they might very well mean someone they've never met.

"To me, a person I never met, I would not think I know them," she said. "But if you're 13 years old, you don't think that. It's not my idea of friendship, but then, I'm not 13 years old. I'm not opposed to it."

Friendship, she says, is the most important relationship, because unlike family or even sexual attachment — which is largely a chemical thing — it is chosen consciously, willingly.

"Most people have very few actual friends," she said. "Try to get something from that friend. I don't mean like a thing, like money. Try to get some sort of actual emotion from that person. You're not going to get it. And that's true of many friends that people think they have, that they know. A friend is a rare thing."

Martin Scorsese is one such friend. The two are incorrigible talkers. And they fired each other up over their 2021 Netflix project, "Pretend it's a City" (her plaint to slow-walkers, distracted cellphone users and others who don't seem to recognize they are in a metropolis of nine million).

It was at her suggestion that Scorsese visited the Queens Museum and filmed Lebowitz bestriding a gigantic model of Manhattan, created by Robert Moses for the 1964 World's Fair.

Here, she really got to pretend it was a city. More, she got to pretend she was King Kong.

"The guy in charge of that exhibit was one of the most nervous people I'd ever seen in my life," she recalled. "No one had ever been allowed to walk on it before. At a certain point, I 'knocked down the Queensboro Bridge. I thought the guy was going to have a heart attack."

But New York, as we know, is resilient. That's one reason people like Lebowitz continue to flock to it.

"It didn't break," she said. "I just put it back up."

Fran Lebowitz, 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22, Shea Center for Performing Arts, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Rd., Wayne. $25 to $50. (973) 720-2371 or wpunj.edu

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This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Fran Lebowitz went from Morristown to NY, and she's not looking back