David Sedaris Quotes

I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn't either. We'd never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I though, like strok...

I didn’t see my sessions as the sort of thing that one would want to advertise, but as my teacher liked to say, I guess it takes all kinds. Whereas my goal was to keep it a secret, hers was to inform...

I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings.

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

I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.

I wasn’t broken, just resting, readying myself for the next big thing.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

If you don’t want to marry a homosexual, then don’t. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor’s options? It’s like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Chr...

In imagining myself as modest, mysterious, and fiercely intelligent, I'm forced to realize that, in real life, I am none of these qualities. Nobody dreams of the things he already has.

In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: Shut up. That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhe...

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.

Isn’t that sweet of my only son to travel all this way so he can whine about his pathetic little friend? Maybe if I weren’t strapped to my deathbed I could muster up the strength to give a damn.

It is what it is, which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see. Isn’t that the state motto of South Dakota? I said the second or third time I heard it.

It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shaky ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that eve...

It's astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex - trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsess...

It’s common to be misread by people who don’t know you.

I’d been at the plant for three weeks when Curly invited me to his trailer for a drink. He lived just outside Hood River in a double-wide he shared with his mother, a woman he often spoke about. I tol...

I’m surrounded by people who have more money than they know what to do with, and none of them have earned it.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, so...

Live with liberty, and your imagination can soar.