Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Today the teacher called me a sadist. I tried to say that was like the pot calling the kettle black but came out with something closer to “That is like a pan saying to a dark pan, ‘You are a pan.”

— David Sedaris

103. “The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention.”

— David Sedaris

104. “We can’t profess love without talking through hand puppets.”

— David Sedaris

105. “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.”

— David Sedaris

106. “Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. “Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the front window.”

— David Sedaris

107. “It make one’s mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.”

— David Sedaris

108. “People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.”

— David Sedaris

109. “All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.”

— David Sedaris

110. “Actually I liked that ‘Let the Right One In,’ that Swedish vampire movie.”

— David Sedaris

111. “At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn’t imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.”

— David Sedaris

112. “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

113. “Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

115. “I cry all the time when I watch ‘Glee’ because I don’t know if it’s satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.”

— David Sedaris

116. “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.”

— David Sedaris

117. “It’s unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.”

— David Sedaris

118. “We’re not pessimists, exactly, but in late middle age, when you envision your life ten years down the line, you’re more likely to see a bedpan than a Tony Award.”

— David Sedaris

119. “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.”

— David Sedaris

120. “Another thing I love about the beach is sitting in the sun, mainly for the lazy kind of talk it generates. A person can say anything with lotion on, and I’m more than willing to listen.”

— David Sedaris

121. “Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. Ions might charge the air but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination – my imagination, anyway.”

— David Sedaris

122. “And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I’d remind him that these were pests – disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware.”

— David Sedaris

123. “Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a “good-bye” or “thank-you,” cashiers are apt to say, “Have a blessed day.” This can make you feel like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne. “Get it off me!” I always want to scream. “Quick, before I start wearing ties with short-sleeved shirts!”

— David Sedaris

124. “I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.”

— David Sedaris

125. “The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.”

— David Sedaris

126. “Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.”

— David Sedaris

127. “It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.”

— David Sedaris

128. “This is where my mom and dad were the night Martin Luther King was assassinated,” I said to Hugh after we had ordered. “Not here at the airport, obviously, but at their original location downtown.” I told him how someone had stepped out of the kitchen to announce the news, and how everyone but my parents had applauded. “Our family hadn’t been in the South very long, and that was a real eye-opener.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

130. “He’s as nutty as a vegan T-bone.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

132. “I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.”

— David Sedaris

133. “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.”

— David Sedaris

134. “I’m not a parent myself, but I think the best solution at this point is to slap that child across the face. It won’t stop crying, but at least now it’ll be doing it for a good reason.”

— David Sedaris

135. “As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof.”

— David Sedaris

136. “What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them.”

— David Sedaris

137. “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.”

— David Sedaris

138. “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.”

— David Sedaris

139. “Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.”

— David Sedaris

140. “I didn’t know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.”

— David Sedaris

141. “For that’s all Gatorade ever tastes like – its color. Over the period that I had my stomach virus, I tried them all: blue, red, green, yellow, orange, and a new opaque one that tasted opaque.”

— David Sedaris

142. “I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn’t want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.”

— David Sedaris

143. “The fake slap invariably makes contact, adding the elements of shock and betrayal to what had previously been plain old-fashioned fear.”

— David Sedaris

144. “It’s safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won’t be able to smoke anywhere in America.”

— David Sedaris

145. “I’m not a misogynist. I’m a misanthrope. I hate everyone equally.”

— David Sedaris

146. “Besides, if I wanted to hear people speaking wall-to-wall French, all I had to do was remove my headphones and participate in what is known as ‘real life,’ a concept as uninviting as a shampoo cocktail.”

— David Sedaris

147. “Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?”

— David Sedaris

148. “I think about death all the time, but only in a romantic, self-serving way, beginning, most often, with my tragic illness and ending with my funeral. I see my brother squatting beside my grave, so racked by guilt that he’s unable to stand. “If only I’d paid him back that twenty-five thousand dollars I borrowed,” he says. I see Hugh, drying his eyes on the sleeve of his suit jacket, then crying even harder when he remembers I bought it for him.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

150. “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.”

— David Sedaris