David Rakoff Quotes

“The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”

— David Rakoff

“Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.”

— David Rakoff

There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind.

— David Rakoff

“There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home.”

— David Rakoff

I am going to the bad place, as is my wont.

— David Rakoff

One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' laws of thermodynamics!

— David Rakoff

“Almost any age is better than twenty-two.”

— David Rakoff

“If all of the money was gone from my life,
Would you still love me?" a man asks his wife.
"Of course," she replies. "Come here, let me kiss you.
I'll love you forever, but boy would I miss you!”

— David Rakoff

“When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you.”

— David Rakoff

I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character.

— David Rakoff

“Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass.”

— David Rakoff

“In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me.”

— David Rakoff

“I had a tumor. But it was great.”

— David Rakoff

“I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them.”

— David Rakoff

“The overriding sense of Tokyo ... is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future.”

— David Rakoff

“But even this gives rise to another central tenet, attendant to the Comedy Is Good myth: Comedy Is Hard. Certainly well-rendered comedy is hard. All things done well require practice and work. But for the most funny people, being funny is as inevitable as being double-jointed; it is a worldview formed long before words. One is born funny. The adage, as is, is incomplete. It should be Comedy is hard ... if you're not funny. Pirouettes are almost impossible ... without legs. Jokes can be honed, made better, tighter, and cleaner, and people can even be made funnier. But you can't really make someone funny who isn't.”

— David Rakoff

“We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening. It's what we do as a species. When I am being told, I listen, mindful of the honor, remembering all the while that the shore would be mistaken to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful.”

— David Rakoff

“With no small remorse, she thought, "He and his mess
Better not come near this fabulous dress".”

— David Rakoff

“The man beside me, apropos of nothing, raises his hand and says that there is 'a story' that man started society because he was 'cast out of a garden because of a sin.' He doesn't attribute this anecdote, leaving it a blind item from a source we might not know. He seems nice enough but potentially dangerous.”

— David Rakoff

“There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.”

— David Rakoff

It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humour does.

— David Rakoff

“Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely
structured mistake.”

— David Rakoff

“One day reach idealization;
after all, it's the journey, not the destination.”

— David Rakoff

Taking both of Kay's hands with no rancor, no bile,
Helen looks in her eyes and breaks into a smile.
"You're right", Helen says, "I should call it a day."
Helen smiles one more time, and them adds, "Fuck off, Kay.

— David Rakoff

“The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy - large, ungainly potato like things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days - cut into my feet and draw blood as if the were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in.”

— David Rakoff

“The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism.”

— David Rakoff

“Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell.”

— David Rakoff

“It can be hard to remember what one's anticipatory image of something was once you're on the other side. I'm no longer sure exactly what it was I was waiting for, but I do know that it was something wholly unfamiliar and thrilling. Like a new color. Not a mixture, no trace of blue or yellow or red. What would that look like? I have some basic understanding about light
how it can only be broken down and refracted into its seven constituent hues
and even though I know that the physical world makes the existence of such a thing basically impossible, I'd still really like to see that.”

— David Rakoff

“My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.”

— David Rakoff

“I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving.”

— David Rakoff

“But thanks to my rapidly dividing cells, I no longer have that feeling-although I remember it very well-that if I just buckled down to the great work at hand, lived more authentically, stopped procrastinating, cut out sugar, then my best self was just there right around the corner. Yeah, no. I'm done with all that. I”

— David Rakoff

One day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother-who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch.

— David Rakoff

“It seems frankly remarkable that anyone anywhere ever attempted anything.”

— David Rakoff

“Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out.”

— David Rakoff

“Deprived of the opportunity to judge one another by the cars we drive, New Yorkers, thrown together daily on mass transit, form silent opinions based on our choices of subway reading. Just by glimpsing the cover staring back at us, we can reach the pinnacle of carnal desire or the depths of hatred. Soul mate or mortal enemy.”

— David Rakoff

“I'm not sure. But that bless-his/her-heart kind of melancholic humor is among my favorite things in the world. I guess it exposes a kind of humanity - or that's the hope, at least - a kind of grudging respect for human frailty. Unless it's actually kicking human frailty while it's down - I'm not sure.”

— David Rakoff

“I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, 'Damn it, the tumor's 10 percent bigger,' before he even said hello.”

— David Rakoff

“Arts and crafts, or getting to be in a play with people, or making a little short film, that's pure sugar, because the stakes are so low.”

— David Rakoff

“I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled.”

— David Rakoff

“At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it's pretty nifty: I don't mine coal; I get paid to write.”

— David Rakoff

I do not go outdoors ... As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach.

— David Rakoff

“About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact.”

— David Rakoff

I don't particularly consider myself an actor. I have no training. I love doing it, but I would never consider myself to be a colleague of an actual actor. That would be stepping way up in class on my part.

— David Rakoff

“It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing.”

— David Rakoff

'Play It Again Sam's opening shot is the same as 'Purple Rose's final one: a close-up of a face, rapt in a movie house. I've certainly felt that in my life. I've been known to cry watching Gene Kelly.

— David Rakoff

“Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better.”

— David Rakoff

I have let half-decades elapse between books because books have to be writte and writing is awful, but if you are the type of person who makes things, there is no profit in worrying about how or why or when the next project will come into being beyond simply acknowledging that it is inevitable that it will be very soon.

— David Rakoff

“We're creatures of contact regardless of whether/ we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.”

— David Rakoff

“Unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask.”

— David Rakoff

“In the window, I fantasize ... about providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight ...”

— David Rakoff