Top 100 David Sedaris Quotes
#1. Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.
David Sedaris
#2. I wasn't broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.
David Sedaris
#3. The two of you grew apart,' my mother would say. She made it sound as if we'd veered off in different directions, though in fact we had the exact same destination. I just never made it.
David Sedaris
#4. The autopsy took place in the morning and was the best argument for the buddy systemI had ever seen. Never live alone, I told myself. Before you chane a lightbulb, call someone from the other room and have him watch until you are finished.
David Sedaris
#5. He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!
David Sedaris
#6. This grown man who now phones his father to say, Motherfucker, I ain't seen pussy so long, I'd throw stones at it.
David Sedaris
#7. I think it's good to have the alone time. Well, I kind of have to, because I have to be alone in order to work, so I have alone time. And then I go on tour and I have being-around-people time.
David Sedaris
#8. When you're young it's easy to believe that such a opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one.
David Sedaris
#9. It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again.
David Sedaris
#10. Well, that's a hell of a reason to poison yourself.
David Sedaris
#11. What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.
David Sedaris
#12. It was the artist's duty to find the appropriate objects, and the audience's job to decipher meaning. If the piece failed to work, it was their fault, not yours.
David Sedaris
#13. Real trouble doesn't walk around with a ponytail. It doesn't have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.
David Sedaris
#14. In trying to be memorable, you wind up sounding unspeakably queer
David Sedaris
#15. Live with liberty, and your imagination can soar.
David Sedaris
#16. I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.
David Sedaris
#17. Weeks passed, my suitcase grew more and more conventional. "I've got something for you," I'd say to a teenager. "It's nothing huge,
David Sedaris
#18. You're the man now,' she said to me after my father died, 'you're the man.' Then she turned to Popeye, our calico tom, and said, 'You're the cat now, Popeye, you're the cat,' as if she'd always worn a veil over her face and had never known we were men and cats all along.
David Sedaris
#19. If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm.
David Sedaris
#20. That's what fantasies are for: they allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top.
David Sedaris
#21. The bow tie is like the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.
David Sedaris
#22. In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.
David Sedaris
#23. You have how many children in your family?" the teacher would ask. "I'm guessing you must be Catholic, am I right?
David Sedaris
#25. My sister's the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline ... Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it's not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it's certainly under investigation
so there.
David Sedaris
#26. All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.
David Sedaris
#27. My family isn't really all that different from anyone else's. Well, maybe they're a bit more entertaining.
David Sedaris
#28. I don't think my life is more interesting than anybody else's.
David Sedaris
#29. Trying to explain moral principles to Khe Sahn was like reviewing a standard 1040 tax form with a house cat!
David Sedaris
#31. Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to.
David Sedaris
#32. When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there's a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.
David Sedaris
#33. Love seemed all the sweeter when it was misunderstood, condemned by the outside world.
David Sedaris
#34. Broke a nail clean off, and when it grew back it looked like a Brazil nut.
David Sedaris
#35. Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.
David Sedaris
#36. Dad said that the guy who can play guitar is going to be the life of the party. He's confusing life with death.
David Sedaris
#37. Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.
David Sedaris
#38. In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no face-lift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings.
David Sedaris
#39. If you are any kind of an artist, then validation ... can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway. Because you're just wired that way. It's so engrained, it's such a part of your personality that you don't just stop doing it.
David Sedaris
#40. I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the 'Harry Potter' books.
David Sedaris
#41. Most of my ribbons were for good sportsmanship, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.
David Sedaris
#42. I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.
David Sedaris
#43. There are lots of things that happen to me that I don't write about.
David Sedaris
#44. Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.
David Sedaris
#45. When shit brings you down, just say 'fuck it', and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.
David Sedaris
#48. If I'd been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.
David Sedaris
#49. I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.
David Sedaris
#50. The position was offered at the last minute, when the scheduled professor found a better-paying job delivering pizza.
David Sedaris
#51. Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.
David Sedaris
#52. True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.
David Sedaris
#53. Eventually I would set him straight, but until then, at least for another few seconds, I wanted to stay in this happy place. So loved and protected. So fulfilled.
David Sedaris
#54. In my dream world gay people in America would get the right to marry, and not a one of them would use that right.
David Sedaris
#55. What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.
David Sedaris
#56. I like high school and college writing textbooks and find them very helpful. Whenever I'm stuck and seem to have no ideas, I open one up and turn to the back. There I'll find questions like, "Have you had any experiences with an alcoholic or a sailor?"
David Sedaris
#57. On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddamnit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something.
David Sedaris
#58. I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost it in my family
David Sedaris
#59. Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, Your trash. You're trash. Your family's trash.
David Sedaris
#61. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.
David Sedaris
#62. I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.
David Sedaris
#63. If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?
David Sedaris
#64. I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide ... My mom was actually jealous.
David Sedaris
#65. Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.
David Sedaris
#66. I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.
David Sedaris
#67. I like listening to books as well, as that way you can iron at the same time.
David Sedaris
#68. I can't promise I'll never kill anyone again," he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. "It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters
David Sedaris
#69. The dialogue fills the auditorium like an unrefrigerated boxcar of month-old steaks.
David Sedaris
#70. You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.
David Sedaris
#71. Even then that without them, I was nothing. Not a son or a brother but just a boy - and
David Sedaris
#72. It was a father, one hand resting teapot-style on his hip, and the other - what would be the spout - formed into a fist.
David Sedaris
#73. Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I'd remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I'd wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.
David Sedaris
#74. Motherfucker, you haven't got the fucking balls God gave a goddamned church mouse. You crawled out of your mama's tattered old pussy, grabbed hold of her milk stained titties, and you ain't never looked back, motherfucker.
David Sedaris
#75. But at the end of every show we would realize that true happiness often lies where you very least expect it. It might arrive in a form of a gentle breeze or a handful of peanuts, but when it came, we would seize it with our own brand of folksy wisdom.
David Sedaris
#76. If you don't think a mental patient has the right to bring a sawed-off shotgun to the church where his ex-girlfriend is getting married, you're part of the problem.
David Sedaris
#77. It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script.
David Sedaris
#78. I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I'm pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.
David Sedaris
#79. In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.
David Sedaris
#80. Because I've always been a fairly nervous person.
David Sedaris
#81. Famous people like to choose friends who won't go around repeating their conversations and details about them.
David Sedaris
#82. In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl'.
David Sedaris
#83. All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.
David Sedaris
#84. As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.
David Sedaris
#85. If practiced correctly, generosity can induce feelings of shame, inadequacy, and even envy, to name just a few.
David Sedaris
#86. I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
David Sedaris
#87. A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.
David Sedaris
#88. On the off chance my caller would tell me to quit drinking, I positioned myself on the sofa with two six-packs and a bottle of nice scotch. Then I turned on the TV and ate a sandwich made from leftover chicken lo mein. I call it a Chanwich.
David Sedaris
#89. On one tour, I was collecting stories about pet monkeys. You'd be surprised how many people have stories about monkeys. The problem is, most monkey stories end tragically.
David Sedaris
#90. Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time.
David Sedaris
#91. But I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.
David Sedaris
#92. It's not lost on me that I'm so busy recording life, I don't have time to really live it.
David Sedaris
#93. The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn't exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes.
David Sedaris
#94. Here I've given him a good eight inches and a shot at immortality and he'll turn on me the same way he did last year when I asked him to pose for a few nude sketches. Ingrate
David Sedaris
#95. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?
David Sedaris
#96. To be fair, he had never actually promised to be monogamous. That was my idea, and though I tried my hardest to convert him, the allure of other people was just too great.
David Sedaris
#98. At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.
David Sedaris
#99. The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin "Tubby" Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.
David Sedaris
#100. Poor, chubby Annette Kelper, who desperately tries to pretend that nobody notices the fact that she's balding on top of her head. That's right. Look closely - balding just like a man. Perhaps Randy feels sorry for chrome-dome Annette.
David Sedaris
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