Quotes About David Sedaris

#1. David Sedaris is so good that it makes me mad.

Bill Hader

#2. Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.

Sloane Crosley

#3. I heard David Sedaris read live recently which was a complete delight. Few writers make me laugh out loud on the bus. He does.

Hattie Morahan

#4. Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.

Gayle Forman

#5. I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.

Pauley Perrette

#6. It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.

David Sedaris

#7. The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention

David Sedaris

#8. Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

David Sedaris

#9. The message was that if something is free, you should only take the best. If, on the other hand, you're forced to pay, it's best to lower the bar and not be so choosy.

David Sedaris

#10. I wasn't broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.

David Sedaris

#11. I'm for gay elopement, not for gay weddings. I've been with my boyfriend for twenty years. I don't feel like that would validate our relationship in any way. But I would really fight for someone else to have the right. Just elope, though, please.

David Sedaris

#12. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window.

David Sedaris

#13. A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

David Sedaris

#14. 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

#15. The beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.

David Sedaris

#16. I attribute my wife's language to the fact that she's one-quarter spaniel. She says she's only an eighth, but, come on, the ears say it all. That and her mouth. (The Faithful Setter)

David Sedaris

#17. Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don't need anything else and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they're somehow always the ones who benefit.

David Sedaris

#18. On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind.

David Sedaris

#19. Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. That's what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.

David Sedaris

#20. 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

#21. I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.

David Sedaris

#22. We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.

David Sedaris

#23. You have what we in France call 'good time teeth,'" she said. "Why on earth would you want to change them?" "Um, because I can floss with the sash to my bathrobe?

David Sedaris

#24. The real life of the party is flattened beneath the bed, taping actual sex encounters, not sitting cross-legged on the floor with a guitar, embarrassing himself and others.

David Sedaris

#25. He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!

David Sedaris

#26. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

David Sedaris

#27. Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire," adding, "This one is for Joan.

David Sedaris

#28. Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, I'm going to ask you to come with me.

David Sedaris

#29. It didn't seem fair to me that Jon Stewart's rally didn't get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck's did. Why was Beck's seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?

David Sedaris

#30. I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn't want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.

David Sedaris

#31. 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

#32. Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.

David Sedaris

#33. He secretly thinks he looks like Marlon Brando, but take a good look a young Marlin Perkins is more like it! Maybe that's what he sees in Annette Kelper - he's an animal lover.

David Sedaris

#34. He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn't it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences and somehow bring us together?

David Sedaris

#35. Having spent my life trying to fit the will of others, I was unable to distinguish between what I enjoyed and what I thought I should enjoy.

David Sedaris

#36. Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.

David Sedaris

#37. Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.

David Sedaris

#38. Right, I breast feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.

David Sedaris

#39. 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

#40. I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.'

David Sedaris

#41. Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.

David Sedaris

#42. When you're young it's easy to believe that such a opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one.

David Sedaris

#43. No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

David Sedaris

#44. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.

David Sedaris

#45. The things I've bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

David Sedaris

#46. I know it sounds calculating, but if you're not cute, you might as well be clever.

David Sedaris

#47. The Bible says that it's all right to cast the first stone if someone dead is telling you to do it

David Sedaris

#48. 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

#49. Since when do politics affect a mammals ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who says a burning mouse can't run a distance of twelve feet?

David Sedaris

#50. Well, that's a hell of a reason to poison yourself.

David Sedaris

#51. The good thing about being gay was always that you didn't have a wedding. People would say, "He's gay, but at least he didn't make us go to his wedding. He didn't make us fly across the country. He didn't make us choose between the fish and the beef."

David Sedaris

#52. And it's bad enough to be caught in your underpants but even worse to be caught in your underpants scratching out a valium prescription on someone else's pad.

David Sedaris

#53. I love getting attention, just like a child loves it, and it's never worn off. So when people say, oh the book signings go on, why would I shoo away someone who's giving me attention? What part of standing in line for 10 hours to say how much they love you is bad to you?

David Sedaris

#54. What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

David Sedaris

#55. I need to touch the person's head again. Experience has taught me that you can do this three times before the head's owner either yells at you or rings for the flight attendant.

David Sedaris

#56. 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

#57. Most people, or at least most of the people that I've come into contact with, would like to be written about.

David Sedaris

#58. Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

David Sedaris

#59. It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election.

David Sedaris

#60. I've never gone on Facebook and am not sure I understand it. The same goes for Twitter. I have someone sending tweets and pretending to be me, but I don't know why.

David Sedaris

#61. Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.

David Sedaris

#62. And I'm here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it's really not that bad.

David Sedaris

#63. 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

#64. In trying to be memorable, you wind up sounding unspeakably queer

David Sedaris

#65. We flew to Los Angeles, where I secured a new passport. The picture in my stolen one wasn't half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person's face drawn on it.

David Sedaris

#66. Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently and it was like, 'Yikes! What the hell happened?

David Sedaris

#67. I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an unarmed struggle against the undead.

David Sedaris

#68. Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.

David Sedaris

#69. There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.

David Sedaris

#70. Not giving is no different than taking.

David Sedaris

#71. I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.

David Sedaris

#72. If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?

David Sedaris

#73. I don't like travelling if I know I have to write about it.

David Sedaris

#74. Live with liberty, and your imagination can soar.

David Sedaris

#75. I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.

David Sedaris

#76. 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

#77. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like.

David Sedaris

#78. The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.

David Sedaris

#79. 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

#80. I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings.

David Sedaris

#81. ...Nothing is more disgusting than a glass of milk, especially French milk, which comes in a box and can sit unrefrigerated for five months, at which point it simply turns into cheese and is moved to a different section of the grocery store.

David Sedaris

#82. People in trailers were canned and labeled much like the apple juice down at the plant, stamped with ingredients for all the world to see: chicken fried steak, overcooked vegetables, no working knowledge of any major Italian movie directors
the list went on and on.

David Sedaris

#83. If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm.

David Sedaris

#84. There was a sink for washing glasses and an assortment of cartoon napkins illustrating the lighter side of alcoholism.

David Sedaris

#85. We give anonymously because the sackfuls of thank-you letters break our hearts with their clumsy handwriting and hopeless phonetic spelling.

David Sedaris

#86. If you think too hard about anything it's bound to take the fun out of it.

David Sedaris

#87. If you read somebody's diary, you get what you deserve.

David Sedaris

#88. she was the human equivalent of a storm cloud.

David Sedaris

#89. She knew what my mother did not: either you want a clean floor or you want to use a mop, but you can't have both.

David Sedaris

#90. Even if I were informed, what's the likelihood of changing anyone's opinion, especially a couple of strangers'? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn't theirs be?

David Sedaris

#91. The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready
so who was she to advise me on anything?

David Sedaris

#92. That's what fantasies are for: they allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top.

David Sedaris

#93. All I can say is that if it helps to have friends, it helps even more to have friends who are governors!

David Sedaris

#94. The bow tie is like the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party.

David Sedaris

#95. I gave my mother a matching set [of mugs] for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike.

David Sedaris

#96. I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.

David Sedaris

#97. In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.

David Sedaris

#98. You have how many children in your family?" the teacher would ask. "I'm guessing you must be Catholic, am I right?

David Sedaris

#99. I'd Begin to imagine my life in a foreign country, some faraway land where, if things went wrong, i could always blame somebody else, saying I'd never wanted to live there in the first place.

David Sedaris

#100. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

David Sedaris