Top 380 David Sedaris Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don’t, or couldn’t learn on their own if they cared to.”

— David Sedaris

352. “I didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.” I think of it as a switch that turns someone from a profession to a person, and it works both ways. “I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.”

— David Sedaris

353. “She said, “I’m going to have you fired.” I had two people say that to me today, “I’m going to have you fired.” Go ahead, be my guest. I’m wearing a green velvet costume; it doesn’t get any worse than this. Who do these people think they are? I’m going to have you fired!” and I wanted to lean over and say, “I’m going to have you killed.”

— David Sedaris

354. “You know how mice are – anything for a little affection.”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

356. “The problem isn’t gaining weight, it’s gaining it in the right place.”

— David Sedaris

357. “It didn’t seem fair to me that Jon Stewart’s rally didn’t get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck’s did. Why was Beck’s seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?”

— David Sedaris

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

— David Sedaris

359. “If I’d been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.”

— David Sedaris

360. “When I got back to the apartment, the phone rang. It was Dad, who told me I should try to get work as a model. I told him he was being ridiculous and he said no, he’d just been at the barbershop and saw a GQ magazine with a guy on the cover who looked just like me. So I went to the newsstand and found a copy and the person on the cover was not a model but Gary Oldman.”

— David Sedaris

361. “I’ve outlawed “meds,” “bestie,” “bucket list,” “dysfunctional,” “expat,” “cab-sav,” and the verb “do” when used in a restaurant, as in “I’ll do the snails on cinnamon toast.”

— David Sedaris

362. “Then I met a woman named Janine who was bitten and had to spend a week in the hospital. “It was completely my own fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have been wearing sandals.” “It didn’t have to strike you,” I reminded her. “It could have just slid away.” Janine was the type who’d likely blame herself for getting mugged. “It’s what I get for having anything worth taking!” she’d probably say.”

— David Sedaris

363. “I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an unarmed struggle against the undead.”

— David Sedaris

364. “We’re like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other’s hands and missing every time.”

— David Sedaris

365. “I had that in my mouth ten minutes ago and now it’s a private part?”

— David Sedaris

366. “I can manage in a restaurant, take a cab, and even make small talk with the driver. “Do you have children?” I ask. “Will you take a vacation this year?” “Where to?” When he turns it around, as Japanese cabdrivers are inclined to do, I tell him that I have three children, a big boy and two little girls. If Pimsleur included “I am a middle-aged homosexual and thus make do with a niece I never see and a very small godson,” I’d say that. In the meantime, I work with what I have.”

— David Sedaris

367. “Because I’ve always been a fairly nervous person.”

— David Sedaris

368. “Be ye mad, woman?”

— David Sedaris

369. “Occasionally I’d tune in to a music station, but I always preferred the sound of people talking, even if the subject was something I didn’t care about.”

— David Sedaris

370. “Some people, I thought, opening the wet wipes so I could wash the tumor off my hands before I touched my wallet.”

— David Sedaris

371. “One day I’ll wish I had a recording of Gretchen that I could play when I start feeling sorry for myself. I don’t know that I’ve ever met a more enthusiastic person. Her key, I think, is that she’s never stopped being interested in things. She’s never decided that everything reminds her of something else, that everything worthwhile has been crossed off her list.”

— David Sedaris

372. “People in trailers were canned and labeled much like the apple juice down at the plant, stamped with ingredients for all the world to see: chicken fried steak, overcooked vegetables, no working knowledge of any major Italian movie directors – the list went on and on.”

— David Sedaris

373. “Well, think about it,” he said. “Exposing yourself to a girl is one thing. Doing it to a boy, though – the guy would have to be perverted.”

— David Sedaris

374. “At what point had I realized that class couldn’t save you, that addiction or mental illness didn’t care whether you’d taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?”

— David Sedaris

375. “Did you just tell that lady you’re a doctor?” Amy would ask. “A little,” I’d say.”

— David Sedaris

376. “It wasn’t where they belonged, necessarily. It was just where they ended up.”

— David Sedaris

377. “I once considered suing Farrah Fawcett for invasion of privacy. Hardly a day passed when I didn’t see her on a magazine cover, an ad, a poster. She was destroying my life, but now she’s OK.”

— David Sedaris

378. “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.”

— David Sedaris

379. “By this point it was 2:58, and I was starting to panic, thinking, I guess, that if I didn’t give the money away by 3:16, the God I claim not to believe in, the one whose only son was used to sell nails in one of my favorite jokes, was going to smite me.”

— David Sedaris

380. “No surprises, no practical jokes, nothing unexpected, but a parent can’t control everything, and there’s a world of backfiring cars and their human equivalents.”

— David Sedaris

381. “It’s nothing I’d want for myself, but I suppose it’s fine for those who prefer food and family to things of real value.”

— David Sedaris

382. “The Artist’s impressions of a walk in the woods. The Artist’s view on viewing. The Artist on Art. How do you get your ideas for stories, Mr. Valentine? Well, I simply exploit everything I come into contact with. One ended, of course, by losing all spontaneity. You saw people as characters, sunsets as an excuse for similes –.”

— David Sedaris

383. “How does someone undress you with his eyes when you’re already undressed?” I asked. “By that point what’s he looking at, your soul?”

— David Sedaris

384. “There are few greater pleasures than feeling proud of someone, of worrying you might burst with it, especially if that someone is related to you and therefore part of your organization. I’ve always thought of my family that way, as a company. What’s good for one of us is good for all of us. Our jobs are to advance the name Sedaris.”

— David Sedaris

385. “A man can beat his wife with car antennas, can trade his children for drugs or motorcycles, but still, when he finally, mercifully, dies, his survivors will have to hear from some know-nothing at the post-funeral dinner that he did his best. This, I’m guessing, is based on the premise that we all give 110 percent all the time, regarding everything: our careers, our relationships, the attention we pay to our appearance, etc.”

— David Sedaris

386. “Regardless of whether you voted for him, I thought the president-elect’s identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on. I mean, he pretty much ran on it.”

— David Sedaris

387. “When apple-picking season ended, I got a job in a packing plant and gravitated toward short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”

— David Sedaris

388. “I had discovered, or rediscoverd, that crying is a pleasure – that it can be a pleasure beyond all reckoning if your head is pressed in your mother’s waist and her hands are on your back, and if she happens to be wearing clean clothes.”

— David Sedaris

389. “This afternoon’s Radio 4 quiz show included the line “One in three Americans weighs as much as the other two.”

— David Sedaris

390. “I noticed my mother’s face assume an expression she reserved for unspeakable horror. I had seen this look only twice before: once when she was caught in the path of a charging, rabid pig and then again when I told her I wanted a peach-colored velveteen blazer with matching slacks.”

— David Sedaris