Top 91 David Rakoff Quotes
#1. Rather than making you never want to eat chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by God, and you'll chew really, really hard.
David Rakoff
#2. People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we?
David Rakoff
#3. Fantastic days are what you wish upon those who have so few sunrises left, those whose lungs are so lesion-spangled with new cancer that they should be embracing as much life as they can. Time's a-wasting, go out and have yourself a fantastic day! Fantastic days are for goners.
David Rakoff
#4. The overriding sense of Tokyo ... is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.
David Rakoff
#5. Hoped if she kept the dream hidden and frozen
She soon would forget that she'd never been chosen.
But dreams screams as loud whether thriving or dying
And Helen despite herself never stopped trying.
David Rakoff
#6. One day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother - who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch.
David Rakoff
#7. In the window, I fantasize ... about providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight ...
David Rakoff
#8. Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.
David Rakoff
#9. I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable. I won't lie about that.
David Rakoff
#10. I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope.
David Rakoff
#11. Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too.
David Rakoff
#12. I am the world's worst reporter. I am apt to try too hard to help rather than just document my subjects.
David Rakoff
#13. I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, 'Damn it, the tumor's 10 percent bigger,' before he even said hello.
David Rakoff
#14. There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home.
David Rakoff
#15. It has been a good while since 12:00 a.m. held much attraction for me beyond being a perfectly lovely time to be ensconced in the comfort of my own home, sitting in my underpants, contentedly worrying about something.
David Rakoff
#16. It's the false moral component behind blind animal love that so frosts me. The faulty logic that believes that the capacity to adore a nonhuman creature is somehow a purer form of love.
David Rakoff
#18. Arts and crafts, or getting to be in a play with people, or making a little short film, that's pure sugar, because the stakes are so low.
David Rakoff
#19. I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled.
David Rakoff
#20. Maybe there is some solace to be derived in that: bacchanal or funeral, after enough time, the detritus looks the same.
David Rakoff
#21. In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.
David Rakoff
#22. Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass.
David Rakoff
#23. What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.
David Rakoff
#24. The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.
David Rakoff
#25. He'd paid all his taxes, so that left ... you guessed it.
David Rakoff
#26. It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing.
David Rakoff
#27. Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.
David Rakoff
#28. The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.
David Rakoff
#29. Those weeks before diagnosis can be among the most torturous times. There is a reason you're called a patient once the plastic bracelet goes on.
David Rakoff
#31. Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one's best, then at very least one's most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 and 53 years old.
David Rakoff
#32. The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.
David Rakoff
#33. I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself.
David Rakoff
#34. Central to living a life that is good is a life that's forgiving. We're creatures of contact, regardless of whether we kiss or we wound.
David Rakoff
#35. We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.
David Rakoff
#36. Writing is like pulling teeth.
From my dick.
David Rakoff
#37. About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.
David Rakoff
#38. Everyone I vote for never wins. Welcome to America.
David Rakoff
#39. We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening. It's what we do as a species. When I am being told, I listen, mindful of the honor, remembering all the while that the shore would be mistaken to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful.
David Rakoff
#40. It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapable of not being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner . People might just be gladder when you eventually do.
David Rakoff
#41. 'Play It Again Sam's opening shot is the same as 'Purple Rose's final one: a close-up of a face, rapt in a movie house. I've certainly felt that in my life. I've been known to cry watching Gene Kelly.
David Rakoff
#42. I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky.
David Rakoff
#43. I am going to the bad place, as is my wont.
David Rakoff
#44. I like everything," I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. "I don't hate the world. I'm scared of it. There's a difference.
David Rakoff
#45. It seems frankly remarkable that anyone anywhere ever attempted anything.
David Rakoff
#46. I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn't like being a child. I didn't like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn't like the lack of autonomy.
David Rakoff
#47. Susan adored her and worshiped her style, / Loved her pronouncements of "perfect" and "vile," / Loved the sheer whim, the madcap willy-nillyness / And how deeply seriously Nonnie took her own silliness
David Rakoff
#48. I value kindness in myself and others. I try to remain super-vigilant about my targets and make extra sure that my sometimes barbed comments are deserved and in response to genuine malefaction.
David Rakoff
#49. Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Steven.
David Rakoff
#50. Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.
David Rakoff
#51. Unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask.
David Rakoff
#52. I am neither spontaneous nor ready for anything.
David Rakoff
#53. We're creatures of contact regardless of whether/ we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.
David Rakoff
#54. Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young.
David Rakoff
#55. When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think.
David Rakoff
#56. I have no problem with animals, I just like people more.
David Rakoff
#57. Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely
structured mistake.
David Rakoff
#58. When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.
David Rakoff
#59. At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it's pretty nifty: I don't mine coal; I get paid to write.
David Rakoff
#60. Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging?
David Rakoff
#61. I can see a great beauty in acknowledging the fact that the world is dark.
David Rakoff
#63. A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,
And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mint
Had bundled itself in a stole of gray lint.
David Rakoff
#64. The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play.
David Rakoff
#65. One day reach idealization;
after all, it's the journey, not the destination.
David Rakoff
#66. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it's the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be prettiest.
David Rakoff
#67. I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots.
David Rakoff
#68. One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' laws of thermodynamics!
David Rakoff
#69. Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up.
David Rakoff
#70. Let's face it: professing a deep interest in movies, the absolutely dominant global art form of the last century, is at this point like professing an interest in air. Passion is nice. Erudition is admirable. But it's like that moment when good manners cross over into meaningless etiquette.
David Rakoff
#71. With no small remorse, she thought, "He and his mess
Better not come near this fabulous dress".
David Rakoff
#72. No secrets, no longing, no desperate hoping
Just reach out and grab from a world cracked open.
David Rakoff
#73. There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness.
David Rakoff
#74. If all of the money was gone from my life,
Would you still love me?" a man asks his wife.
"Of course," she replies. "Come here, let me kiss you.
I'll love you forever, but boy would I miss you!
David Rakoff
#75. There's nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking.
David Rakoff
#76. I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving.
David Rakoff
#77. In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power.
David Rakoff
#78. I do tend to be an anxious fellow, and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news.
David Rakoff
#79. It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humour does.
David Rakoff
#80. Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell.
David Rakoff
#81. I do not go outdoors ... As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.
David Rakoff
#82. My salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-Acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive.
David Rakoff
#83. New York is breaking my heart. I've often said that it's like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it.
David Rakoff
#84. Here's the thing: I'm not beautiful. I mean, I'm a perfectly normal-looking Jewish guy. My face has never been my fortune, nor has my body ... physical beauty has never been part of my equation. It's just not on my shopping list.
David Rakoff
#85. But if one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.
David Rakoff
#86. Taking both of Kay's hands with no rancor, no bile,
Helen looks in her eyes and breaks into a smile.
"You're right", Helen says, "I should call it a day."
Helen smiles one more time, and them adds, "Fuck off, Kay.
David Rakoff
#87. Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate.
David Rakoff
#88. I don't particularly consider myself an actor. I have no training. I love doing it, but I would never consider myself to be a colleague of an actual actor. That would be stepping way up in class on my part.
David Rakoff
#89. Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work; get on with the business of one's life.
That's the hope, anyway.
David Rakoff
#90. The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.
David Rakoff
#91. Pessimists are born, true, but they also can be made.
David Rakoff
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