David Sedaris Quotes

“He took a sip of my father's weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. "This shit's like making love in a canoe."
"Excuse me?"
"It's fucking near water.”

— David Sedaris

“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.”

— David Sedaris

Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.

— David Sedaris

“But I don't distinguish between being laughed with, and laughed at. I'll take either.”

— David Sedaris

“No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.”

— David Sedaris

“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

I tend to show everything I do to my family, to check they won't be offended.

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in "How tall was" and I saw "How tall was Jesus," and I'm like, "Sure," and half an hour later you're somewhere you didn't expect to be. It doesn't work that same way in books, does it? Even if you have an encyclopedia, the trail isn't that crazy. I like that aspect of it.

— David Sedaris

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father." He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples." He nice, the Jesus.”

— David Sedaris

I never got the idea of a punishing God, just a really boring one. To see people growing up in the Carolinas who were Baptist, I knew there were others who felt God was going to send them to hell for any little thing, but not me.

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

“I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.”

— David Sedaris

“The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.”

— David Sedaris

“Its 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 are off the charts." The skeleton has a much more limited vocabulary and says only one thing: "You are going to die.”

— David Sedaris

“I can't promise I'll never kill anyone again," he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. "It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters”

— David Sedaris

“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

“Well, that's a hell of a reason to poison yourself.”

— David Sedaris

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

I see you that have a little swimming mouse

— David Sedaris

“Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer.”

— David Sedaris

“True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.”

— David Sedaris

“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

“I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost it in my family”

— David Sedaris

“If you are any kind of an artist, then validation ... can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway. Because you're just wired that way. It's so engrained, it's such a part of your personality that you don't just stop doing it.”

— David Sedaris

“Leeches are singing in my asshole.”

— David Sedaris

The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter.

— David Sedaris

“Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.”

— David Sedaris

“Angels, she said, were God's way of saying howdy.”

— David Sedaris

“That man tried to picka my frienda's pocketoni!”

— David Sedaris

“I'd think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that's what cheap places do
draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I'd found an affordable one it wouldn't have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques.”

— David Sedaris

Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language - total immersion, and you'd have the new slang before it even hit the streets.

— David Sedaris

Nothing irritated her more than these high-and-mighty vegetarians who ate meat sometimes and then decided that it didn't really count.

— David Sedaris

People who have nothing to prove offer practical baby gifts: sturdy cotton rompers made to withstand the cycle of vomit and regular washing. People who are competing for the titles of best-loved aunts and uncles - people like my sisters and me - send satin pants and delicate hand-crafted sweaters accompanied by notes reading P.S. The fur collar is detachable.

— David Sedaris

“Love seemed all the sweeter when it was misunderstood, condemned by the outside world.”

— David Sedaris

I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you're bad he comes to your house and steals things.

— David Sedaris

“He has a point there, that's harsh. Unfortunately, they never gave him a medal for it and as a result he brings it up time and time again.”

— David Sedaris

“Look," I'll say to Jesus, "enough is enough. I suggest we nail some boards together and have ourselves an old-fashioned crucifixion.”

— David Sedaris

“For my fifty dollars, I want to leave the doctor's office in tears, but instead I walk out feeling like a hypochondriac, which is one of the few things I'm actually not.”

— David Sedaris

“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

“At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES - CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS - YOU WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there's no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin, they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you'd need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser forever spouting from the little hole conveniently located in the lid of your cup.”

— David Sedaris

“His voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.”

— David Sedaris

“The part of my plan that made old people uncomfortable, that exposed them for the bigots they were-and on a Sunday!-still appealed to me.”

— David Sedaris

“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

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

“When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh's family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects.”

— David Sedaris

“The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.”

— David Sedaris

“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

When you go to that other country you realize that in France and in England, you don't ask somebody what they do for a living when you meet someone. A lot of the obvious things, the shortcuts we take in America - in America you can talk about money all you want. You can ask how much they make, rent they pay, how much their house costs and how much their car costs, and they'll feel comfortable telling you. But it's scandalous to ask anyone in England or France a question like that.

— David Sedaris

“I'm not afraid to write about madness. I always figure that whatever most embarrasses you is something that everyone can relate to, really ... because we're just not that different. So if you think, 'Oh my god, this is so embarrassing. I can't possibly talk about that,' and you write about it, the audience is gonna be like, 'that happened to me!”

— David Sedaris