Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Often I’d take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.”

— David Sedaris

202. “I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso. Worse is that he loves them as much as he loves you, which is to say not at all, really. The entire relationship has been your own invention.”

— David Sedaris

203. “When you read comic material and people aren’t laughing how do you know they’re listening.”

— David Sedaris

204. “Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless – that’s what hell must be like.”

— David Sedaris

205. “In my book, if you want to be treated like an old person, you have to look like one. That means no face-lift, no blond hair, and definitely no fishnet stockings.”

— David Sedaris

206. “Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I’d remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I’d wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.”

— David Sedaris

207. “Movie characters might chase each other through the fog or race down the stairs of burning buildings, but that’s for beginners. Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings. I wanted to say something to this effect, but my hand puppets were back home in their drawer. Instead, I pulled my chair a few inches closer, and we sat silently at our little table on the square, looking for all the world like two people in love.”

— David Sedaris

208. “Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab.”

— David Sedaris

209. “The better country club operated on the principle that Raleigh mattered, that its old families were fine ones, and that they needed a place where they could enjoy one another’s company without being pawed at. Had we not found this laughable, our country club might have felt desperate.”

— David Sedaris

210. “Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, “This is boring.” An hour later you could decide that it was the best thing you’d ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.”

— David Sedaris

211. “He told me that his sister is clinically depressed and read Naked during a month-long visit to a psychiatric hospital. According to him, once she’d finished, she loaned it to a fellow patient, who, in turn, loaned it to someone else. The book seemed to lift people’s spirits, and as a result, the hospital has made it recommended reading. I’m not sure whether I believe this, but it’s extremely flattering to think my book is being passed around a German asylum.”

— David Sedaris

212. “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

213. “It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it. I’ve become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It’s not “Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece” but “Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!”

— David Sedaris

214. “And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which – face it – was practically designed to make a man’s stomach and shoulders look good.”

— David Sedaris

215. “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?”

— David Sedaris

216. “When they’re born outside, crows come and pluck their eyes out.”

— David Sedaris

217. “It was the stupidest thing the cat had ever heard of, an AA program in prison.”

— David Sedaris

218. “I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I’m still the one most likely to set your house on fire.”

— David Sedaris

219. “Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.”

— David Sedaris

220. “He didn’t understand that it’s all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that rises its head and nods like cobra when you’re sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it’s even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education.”

— David Sedaris

221. “It means ‘female dog,’” I’d explained to my sisters, “but it also means ’a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.”

— David Sedaris

222. “The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin “Tubby” Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.”

— David Sedaris

223. “I’m not a reporter but the ‘New Yorker’ treats everyone like a reporter.”

— David Sedaris

224. “Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.”

— David Sedaris

225. “Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes – being in love.”

— David Sedaris

226. “On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. “Goddamnit,” I whispered. “I knew I forgot something.”

— David Sedaris

227. “When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of “jazz” as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.”

— David Sedaris

228. “The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it.”

— David Sedaris

229. “I wonder whose job it was to assign these sexes in the first place. Did he do his work right there in the sanitarium, or did they rent him a little office where he could get away from all the noise?”

— David Sedaris

230. “The list” is a growing collection of words and phrases we’d outlaw if given the power to do so. It includes “awesome,” of course, and “It is what it is,” which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see.”

— David Sedaris

231. “Real trouble doesn’t walk around with a ponytail. It doesn’t have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.”

— David Sedaris

232. “Bill Gates, who has murdered more innocents than even the Clintons, apparently.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

234. “When I look at a lot of older stuff that I’ve written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.”

— David Sedaris

235. “Famous people like to choose friends who won’t go around repeating their conversations and details about them.”

— David Sedaris

236. “The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.”

— David Sedaris

237. “Finally he was hit by a train while walking, which is strange because trains don’t generally sneak up on people. For the most part, barring a derailment, you know exactly where to find them.”

— David Sedaris

238. “I just think that the people who say: ‘That’s not true’ when someone tells a story at dinner are the people who didn’t get any laughs when they told their story.”

— David Sedaris

239. “I felt betrayed, the way you do when you discover that your cat has a secret secondary life and is being fed by neighbors who call him something stupid like Calypso.”

— David Sedaris

240. “Most movies, I forget about them while I’m watching them. I go every single day. But I’ve never thought about participating in any way. It’s like being at home all day. It was never a goal to me.”

— David Sedaris

241. “My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there’s a short in the system and I break out over things I didn’t do, which only makes me look more suspect.”

— David Sedaris

242. “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.”

— David Sedaris

243. “It is sad because you would like to believe that everyone is unique and then they disappoint you every time by being exactly the same, asking for the same things, reciting the exact same lines as though they have been handed a script.”

— David Sedaris

244. “It’s hard to love a place that’s outlawed smoking but finds it perfectly acceptable to serve raw fish in a bath of chocolate.”

— David Sedaris

245. “To be fair, he had never actually promised to be monogamous. That was my idea, and though I tried my hardest to convert him, the allure of other people was just too great.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

247. “The position was offered at the last minute, when the scheduled professor found a better-paying job delivering pizza.”

— David Sedaris

248. “Here I’ve given him a good eight inches and a shot at immortality and he’ll turn on me the same way he did last year when I asked him to pose for a few nude sketches. Ingrate.”

— David Sedaris

249. “Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are ‘We’re number two!”

— David Sedaris

250. “The word love was replaced by a heart shape I’m guessing they’ll put on the typewriter keyboard any day now, right beside the exclamation point.”

— David Sedaris