David Sedaris
105 quotes
Biography
David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries".
"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
"Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto."
"Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it."
"Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character."
"When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard."
"If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever."
"Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan."
"The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons."
"A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit."
"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."
"When asked "What do we need to learn this for?"any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness."
"I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met."
"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."
"At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me."
"All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments."
"The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate."
"The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you'll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don't understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge."
"but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment."
"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.'"
"Shit is the tofu of cursing."
"I read "Revolutionary Road" once a year. Aside from its word-by-word construction, I love how his characters deceive themselves."
"Last Christmas I received a set of golf clubs that, my father likes to remind me, cost a goddamned fortune. He says that he would give his right arm for such a beautiful set of clubs."
""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 sense 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."
"It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat, and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal. I'd now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays."
"Because I was lazy, I'd adopted the philosophy that things just happen."