David Sedaris Quotes

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings.

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.

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

All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

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.

But most good movies have a gun in them.

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

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.

Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.

I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the 'Harry Potter' books.

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

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

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you’ve come to mow its lawns.

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

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

Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy.

This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.

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.

If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.

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.

If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?

We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.

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.

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

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

If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.

I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.

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

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.

We can't profess love without talking through hand puppets.

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.

I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.

What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

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

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.

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

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

As a foreigner in London, I like that there are so many other foreigners.

Weird doors open. People fall into things.

I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.