Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

258. “Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently and it was like, ‘Yikes! What the hell happened?”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “That said, I admire people who are curious and open their minds to new possibilities, especially after a certain age. You have to draw the line somewhere, though, and with me it’s my anus.”

— David Sedaris

265. “I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it’s probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it’s the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.”

— David Sedaris

266. “But most good movies have a gun in them.”

— David Sedaris

267. “Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, ‘I’m in love. Can you believe it? I’m finally, totally in love, and I feel great.”

— David Sedaris

268. “I don’t like being left to my own thoughts.”

— David Sedaris

269. “If you read an essay in Esquire and don’t like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it’s in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you.”

— David Sedaris

270. “It’s not that I don’t have opinions about these things. I just don’t feel they’re in any way special. Sure, I follow the news. I read the papers and listen to the radio, but I’m not privy to any inside information. When it comes to politics, all I can offer is emotion. My perspective might be slightly different, but so is anyone’s when they live overseas.”

— David Sedaris

271. “I’ve been keeping diaries for 27 years.”

— David Sedaris

272. “It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.”

— David Sedaris

273. “When young, the animals were sweet. Then one day they became moody and violent, like human teenagers.”

— David Sedaris

274. “In my experience, it was hard to write without your preferred tools, but impossible to write without a cigarette.”

— David Sedaris

275. “In the Netherlands now, I imagine it’s legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.”

— David Sedaris

276. “Making it worse, I had to sit through another endless preview for Titanic. Who do they think is going to see that movie?”

— David Sedaris

277. “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

278. “Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time.”

— David Sedaris

279. “Also, I used to think that one day I might get someone to iron my shirts, but the truth is I really like doing them myself.”

— David Sedaris

280. “I tend to show everything I do to my family, to check they won’t be offended.”

— David Sedaris

281. “That’s the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it’s so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.”

— David Sedaris

282. “You’re trying to convince me?” Amy asked. “The one who has a second apartment two blocks from her first apartment just so she can get away from her rabbit for a couple of hours a day?”

— David Sedaris

283. “I like listening to books as well, as that way you can iron at the same time.”

— David Sedaris

284. “When you’re young it’s easy to believe that such a opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one.”

— David Sedaris

285. “People ask me, ‘Have you ever considered doing stand-up?’ To me it would be less offensive if someone asked me, ‘Have you ever considered dental implants?’”

— David Sedaris

286. “A young couple strolls by, the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other.”

— David Sedaris

287. “For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it – isn’t that what we’ve all been waiting for?”

— David Sedaris

288. “A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. ‘My bad,’ for example, and ‘I’ve got your back’ and ‘You go, girlfriend.’ They’re the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.”

— David Sedaris

289. “I don’t really do very well when I’m sent somewhere. A lot of magazines want to send you somewhere to do something. They want you to stow away on a ship, or something like that.”

— David Sedaris

290. “The nice thing about crowds is that someone can throw a bottle and you don’t take it personally.”

— David Sedaris

291. “July 3, 1981 Raleigh There is a new cancer that strikes only homosexual men. I heard about it on the radio tonight.”

— David Sedaris

292. “Ebola, not the thousands who had died of it in Africa but the single person who had it in Dallas.”

— David Sedaris

293. “Usually, if I think something is really funny, it doesn’t get any reaction whatsoever.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

295. “I don’t like to read anything on the radio for the very first time, because I don’t have any notion of a reaction. When I read it out loud, then I get an idea of that, and more of an idea of how to read.”

— David Sedaris

296. “But songbirds are trash,” the chicken said, and the guinea hen laughed, saying, “Well, then, I guess we could all use a little more trash in our lives.”

— David Sedaris

297. “You have how many children in your family?” the teacher would ask. “I’m guessing you must be Catholic, am I right?”

— David Sedaris

298. “I always used to reach for the cigarette when the phone rang, and I figured nobody would ever call me in Tokyo. The time difference is so profound it’s, like, already September in Tokyo, and I figured nobody would be able to work it out.”

— David Sedaris

299. “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

300. “There are lots of things that happen to me that I don’t write about.”

— David Sedaris