Top 100 Sedaris Quotes
#1. David Sedaris is so good that it makes me mad.
Bill Hader
#2. I remember seeing Amy Sedaris in a stint where she played somebody's alcoholic mother in one scene and in the next she was Ross Perot. I remember thinking she was so awesome.
Stephnie Weir
#3. 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
#4. Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.
Dan Savage
#5. Amy Sedaris makes me laugh harder than anybody.
Andy Cohen
#6. 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
#7. Experience has shown me that standing by oneself reading from one's book isn't especially compelling - unless you're David Sedaris.
Gayle Forman
#8. I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.
Pauley Perrette
#9. They just expected it to you know ... Paul, Steve and I could have hired our own publicist, if we wanted to, but I kind of liked the way it was more of a cult thing and those that liked it, liked it, you know what I mean?
Amy Sedaris
#10. It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.
David Sedaris
#11. 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
#12. Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.
David Sedaris
#13. 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
#14. I wasn't broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.
David Sedaris
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. We're all used to seeing pretty people. I want to see real people.
Amy Sedaris
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I'm drawn to people who look different. I'm not exploiting. I'm not making fun of them. I'm drawn to them.
Amy Sedaris
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.
David Sedaris
#28. We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.
David Sedaris
#29. But I love how people who are musical, they know how to dress.
Amy Sedaris
#30. 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
#31. If you decide on having an alcoholic at your party, make sure it's a large gathering. This way, until the alcoholic begins removing their clothes or dangling the cat out the window, they can sort of blend in. An alcoholic at a small gathering is called an intervention.
Amy Sedaris
#32. 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
#33. He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!
David Sedaris
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to be a hospitable person and have groups of people in your home touching your personables.
Amy Sedaris
#37. 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
#38. I hate playing pretty or sane people. Most people are not attractive or all there.
Amy Sedaris
#39. 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
#40. My kitchen's pink, like skin-tone pink, and I lowered my spice rack so it's eye level - it's true! - and my phone, so I can reach it when I fall, it's right there.
Amy Sedaris
#41. 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
#42. I think it's good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are and to figure out why they are always alone.
Amy Sedaris
#43. 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
#44. Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.
David Sedaris
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. I've named everything that I've ever owned. Real or inanimate, I have to give it a first and last name. Everything in my apartment comes alive at night.
Amy Sedaris
#48. 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
#49. Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.
David Sedaris
#50. Art isn't about following the rules. It's about breaking them.
David Sedaris
#51. A lot of times girls think they're funny, but they want to pretty at the same time, and if you want to be funny, you have to be willing to get ugly.
Amy Sedaris
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Crafting, or 'making things,' has always been a delightful pastime of mine because it requires putting common elements together in order to achieve a lovely something that nobody needs.
Amy Sedaris
#56. I wasn't a cliquey person, and I think that's because I came from a large family. I got along with everybody, and I usually got along with the people that people didn't like.
Amy Sedaris
#57. Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.
David Sedaris
#58. When you're young it's easy to believe that such a opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one.
David Sedaris
#59. No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.
David Sedaris
#60. North Carolina is temperate and populated with well-meaning people; therefore I will engage in oral sex with another man.
David Sedaris
#61. The things I've bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.
David Sedaris
#62. I know it sounds calculating, but if you're not cute, you might as well be clever.
David Sedaris
#63. The Bible says that it's all right to cast the first stone if someone dead is telling you to do it
David Sedaris
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Well, that's a hell of a reason to poison yourself.
David Sedaris
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.
David Sedaris
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Most people, or at least most of the people that I've come into contact with, would like to be written about.
David Sedaris
#74. Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.
David Sedaris
#75. I like dramas and stuff. That's what I watch, but it seems weird that I'd be in it.
Amy Sedaris
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.
David Sedaris
#79. And I'm here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it's really not that bad.
David Sedaris
#80. 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
#81. In trying to be memorable, you wind up sounding unspeakably queer
David Sedaris
#82. I have a lot of fake food in my apartment, but I'm picky about it. Old plaster food, like from the '50s is really nice, hollowed out paper-mache food from old plays - the new stuff just looks too good.
Amy Sedaris
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. Imagination! My problem is that I have so many ideas, I never have enough time to use them all. Just the other day I thought up eleven things I could do with a flowerpot. Eleven! Three of those things didn't even involve plants.
Amy Sedaris
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.
David Sedaris
#90. 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
#91. If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?
David Sedaris
#92. I don't like travelling if I know I have to write about it.
David Sedaris
#93. Live with liberty, and your imagination can soar.
David Sedaris
#94. I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.
David Sedaris
#95. 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
#96. I'm always more attracted to the unattractive.
Amy Sedaris
#97. I like working with the public, and I like that it's really hard work.
Amy Sedaris
#99. The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.
David Sedaris
#100. I'm not a good storyteller. I always think I'm going to get interrupted, or something's going to get edited. I think that comes from being in a large family, so you have to get your story in really quick or someone cuts you off.
Amy Sedaris
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