42 David Sedaris Quotes

David Sedaris quotes

1. 'I love things made out of animals,' Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. 'It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.''

2. Shit is the tofu of cursing.

3. My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.

4. I haven't got 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.

5. 'You kids think you invented sex,' my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern? What produced in others a feeling of exhilaration left Jason and me with a mortifying feeling of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fumblings, we had uncapped some virus we still might escape if we ran fast enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I felt certain I could have made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the ocean like one of those lizards often featured on television wildlife programs.

6. They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.

7. Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?

8. After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

9. For the first twenty years of my life I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and discovered that after a few minutes I could drop off with no problem. Follow seven beers with a couple of scotches and a thimble of good marijuana, and it's funny how sleep just sort of comes on its own. Often I never even make it to bed. I'd squat down to pet the cat and wake up on the floor eight hours later, having lost a perfectly good excuse to change my clothes. I'm now told that this is not called 'going to sleep' but rather 'passing out,' a phrase that carries a distinct hint of judgment.

10. She is, like most of my friends, a terrible judge of character.

11. You can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up a little sometimes, but you can't kill him.

12. I ain't seen pussy in so long I'd throw stones at it.

13. If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding.

14. ... name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the Bow tie was characterized as 'very Charlie McCarthy', while in Chicago a young man defined it as 'the pieced eyebrow of the Republican party'.

1. 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.

2. “Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”

3. One thing I like about the United States, and I kind of miss about the United States, is there's an election coming up here in England, but no one's going to have a sign in front of their house. Nobody's going to wear buttons. And in France, same thing. In America I like that people have signs and buttons and bumper stickers. Sometimes you'll smile at someone from a distance, then you'll get up close and you'll see their pin, and you're like, "Oh my god. I wasted a smile on you?"

4. When you read comic material and people aren't laughing how do you know they're listening.

5. As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.

6. 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.

7. My boyfriend got me a computer three years ago. I'll admit it does make things a lot easier. When I was working on a typewriter and I whited out a line, often I would choose a word to go in the space just because it fit. Now I don't have to do that.

8. I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.

9. 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.

10. Write relentlessly, until you find your voice. Then, use it.

11. I always say to young people, "Get the hell out of the United States." Especially if you're young, like if you're 21 or something. Let's say you don't speak any Italian. You're 21. Everyone's going to want to sleep with you and be nice to you. And the best way to learn a language is to sleep with someone from that country.

12. This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

13. Sometimes I say to myself, 'Oh, I wish I could win a Tony Award', although I'm not that bothered.

14. If you are any kind of an artist, then validation . . . can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway.

15. Actually I liked that 'Let the Right One In,' that Swedish vampire movie.

16. 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'.

17. There’s a lot I don’t tell my father when he calls asking after Amy. He wouldn’t understand that she has no interest in getting married and was, in fact, quite happy to break up with her live-in boyfriend, whom she replaced with an imaginary boyfriend named Ricky. The last time she was asked out by a successful bachelor, Amy hesitated before saying, ‘Thanks for asking, but I’m really not into white guys right now.

18. I just enjoy lying on the couch and reading a magazine.

19. Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?

20. The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.

21. I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

22. There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

23. It's funny how certain objects convey a message - my washer and dryer, for example. They can't speak, of course, but whenever I pass them they remind me that I'm doing fairly well. "No more laundromat for you," they hum. My stove, a downer, tells me every day that I can't cook, and before I can defend myself my scale jumps in, shouting from the bathroom, "Well, he must be doing _something - _my numbers is off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary, and says only one thing: "You are going to die."

24. 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.

25. there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.

26. Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.

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

28. Watching him was like opening the door to a siniging telegram; you know it's supposed to be entertaining, but you can't get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he bringing some joy into your life. Somewhere he had a mother who sifted through a shoe box of mimeographed playbills, pouring herself another drink and wondering when her son would come to his senses and swallow some drain cleaner.