Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 8

301. “Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.”

— David Sedaris

302. “I think there is a difference between comic essays and war reporting, and people can tell that.”

— David Sedaris

303. “I know it sounds calculating, but if you’re not cute, you might as well be clever.”

— David Sedaris

304. “It was, I thought, what evil must smell like.”

— David Sedaris

305. “But I’m a humorist. I’m not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.”

— David Sedaris

306. “I can’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed silence in an American theater. It’s easy to believe that our audiences spend the day saying nothing, actually saving their voices for the moment the picture begins.”

— David Sedaris

307. “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.”

— David Sedaris

308. “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.”

— David Sedaris

309. “She paused, and I took the opportunity to practice the only promotional skill at my disposal: fluttering my fingers over the telephone’s mouthpiece, I attempted to cast a spell, silently chanting, It’s me who you want. Me, me, me.”

— David Sedaris

310. “A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

— David Sedaris

311. “I went from having 50 listeners to 50 million listeners.”

— David Sedaris

312. “Following a brief period of hard-won independence she came to appreciate the fact that people aren’t foolish as much as they are kind. Peg understood that at a relatively early age. Me, it took years.”

— David Sedaris

313. “If some people are “outed,” are other people “inned”? Can we say that someone has been “besided” or “overed”?”

— David Sedaris

314. “I like books on tape, and will listen to just about anything.”

— David Sedaris

315. “September 12, 2001 Paris Last night on TV I watched people jump from the windows of the World Trade Center.”

— David Sedaris

316. “It seems crazy to cut smoking mothers out of textbooks, but within a few years they won’t be allowed in movies either. A woman can throw her newborn child from the roof of a high-rise building. She can then retrieve the body and stomp on it while shooting into the windows of a day-care center, but to celebrate these murders by lighting a cigarette is to send a harmful message. There are, after all, young people watching, and we wouldn’t want them to get the wrong idea.”

— David Sedaris

317. “The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.”

— David Sedaris

318. “It is not unpleasant to hold someone else’s warm teeth in your hand...”

— David Sedaris

319. “Well, that’s a hell of a reason to poison yourself.”

— David Sedaris

320. “Of course, the diary helps me as well. ‘That wasn’t your position on July 7, 1991,’ I’ll remind Hugh an hour after we’ve had a fight. I’d have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.”

— David Sedaris

321. “I never got the idea of a punishing God, just a really boring one. To see people growing up in the Carolinas who were Baptist, I knew there were others who felt God was going to send them to hell for any little thing, but not me.”

— David Sedaris

322. “I am optimistic that things will fall into place, and one day I’ll be sitting in New York City with correct bus fare in my pocket.”

— David Sedaris

323. “The writers she prefers are long dead and are on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is 700 pages long, and the author photo is an engraving, it’s either hers or Hugh’s.”

— David Sedaris

324. “To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don’t see how that’s big news.”

— David Sedaris

325. “I’ve always been very upfront about the way I write, and I’ve always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.”

— David Sedaris

326. “I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the ‘Harry Potter’ books.”

— David Sedaris

327. “The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.”

— David Sedaris

328. “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, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.”

— David Sedaris

329. “This town is the Greek Baltimore.”

— David Sedaris

330. “A few years later, in the midst of a brief academic setback, she trained him to act as her emotional cheerleader. I’d call and hear him in the background, screaming, “We love you, Lisa!” and “You can do it!”

— David Sedaris

331. “But I don’t distinguish between being laughed with, and laughed at. I’ll take either.”

— David Sedaris

332. “Right, I breast feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.”

— David Sedaris

333. “After a year, you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford. Unless, of course, social injustice is you thing, in which case- knock yourself out. The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can’t. Won’t people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder.”

— David Sedaris

334. “Why is it some people can manage a thing like a Fitbit, while others go off the rails and allow it to rule, and perhaps even ruin, their lives?”

— David Sedaris

335. “She hit bottom when she physically attacked a deaf-mute. This was a boy of fourteen, a beloved neighborhood figure who delivered for the nearby deli.”

— David Sedaris

336. “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. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us.”

— David Sedaris

337. “No one writes dialect better than Flannery O’Connor. No one should even try.”

— David Sedaris

338. “I’m often misunderstood at my supermarket in Sussex, not because of my accent but because I tend to deviate from the script. Cashier: Hello, how are you this evening? Me: Has your house ever been burgled? Cashier: What? Me: Your house – has anyone ever broken into it and stolen things? With me, people aren’t thinking What did you say? so much as Why are you saying that?”

— David Sedaris

339. “I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.”

— David Sedaris

340. “Most people, or at least most of the people that I’ve come into contact with, would like to be written about.”

— David Sedaris

341. “I always knew I wanted it to be illustrated.”

— David Sedaris

342. “Low ceiling, stone walls, a dirt floor stamped with paw prints. I never go in without announcing myself. ‘Hyaa!’ I yell. ‘Hyaa. Hyaa!’ It’s the sound my father makes when entering his toolshed, the cry of cowboys as they round up dogies, and it suggests a certain degree of authority. Snakes, bats, weasels – it’s time to head up and move on out.”

— David Sedaris

343. “While I know I can’t control it, what I ultimately hope to recall about my late-in-life father is not his nagging or his toes but, rather, his fingers, and the way he snaps them when listening to jazz. He’s done it forever, signifying, much as a cat does by purring, that you may approach. That all is right with the world. “Man, oh man,” he’ll say in my memory, lifting his glass and taking us all in, “isn’t this just fantastic.”

— David Sedaris

344. “The reverend insists we occupy the first pew. He rang us up not long ago, tipsy – he’s a tippler – saying that our faces brought him closer to God. And it’s true, we’re terribly good-looking people.”

— David Sedaris

345. “What if I’d wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn’t really matter? Try as I might, I still can’t wrap my mind around it.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

347. “Eventually I would set him straight, but until then, at least for another few seconds, I wanted to stay in this happy place. So loved and protected. So fulfilled.”

— David Sedaris

348. “If you see devils, they lock you up, but in America, if you see angels, they put you on morning TV.”

— David Sedaris

349. “When I taught, a lot of my students weren’t big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn’t know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?”

— David Sedaris

350. “I don’t think my life is more interesting than anybody else’s.”

— David Sedaris