Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— David Sedaris

305. “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

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

312. “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

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

317. “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

318. “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

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

— David Sedaris

320. “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

321. “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

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

— David Sedaris

323. “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

324. “This town is the Greek Baltimore.”

— David Sedaris

325. “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

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

— David Sedaris

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

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

— David Sedaris

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

343. “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

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

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

346. “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

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

— David Sedaris

348. “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

349. “Were it not for Sorry! I’d never have known that Kathy’s mother shot a kitten in the head.”

— David Sedaris

350. “Most of my ribbons were for good sportsmanship, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.”

— David Sedaris