David Sedaris Quotes

I wanted it, I wanted, I wanted, but the moment it was mine, it ceased to interest me.

But then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!"

It's fun to see where people live.

What did Trish's mother say when her daughter, heartbroken over her breakup with Randy, came to her in search of love and understanding? 'If you're looking for sympathy you can find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.'

"Neither were we allowed to choose what we ate. I have a friend whose seven-year-old will only consider something if it's white. Had I tried that, my parents would have said, "You're on," and served me a bowl of paste, followed by joint compound, and, maybe if I was good, some semen."

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes — being in love.

mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons — because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming — they don't really count as players.

Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it's there but doesn't for the life of him understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but still I don't get it. Why take chances with money?

Plenty of animals had pets, but few were more devoted than the mouse, who owned a baby corn snake — “A rescue snake, she’d be quick to inform you. This made it sound like he’d been snatched from the jaws of a raccoon, but what she’d really rescued him from was a life without her love. And what sort of a life would that have been?

If cooking is an art, I think we're in our Dada phase.

Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.

When it happens to you it's a national tragedy — Why aren't the papers reporting this? you wonder. Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is.

"One afternoon while driving back from the beach, Hugh pointed out a McDonald's bag vomiting its contents onto the pavement. "I say that any company whose products are found on the ground automatically has to go out of business," he said. This is how we talk nowadays, as if our pronouncements hold actual weight and can be implemented at our discretion, like we're kings or warlocks. "That means no more McDonald's, no more Coke - none of it."

"That wouldn't affect you any,"I told him. Hugh doesn't drink soda or eat Big Macs. "But what if it was something you needed, like paint? I find buckets of it in the woods all the time."

"Fine," he said. "Get rid of it. I'll make my own."

If anyone could make his own paint, it would be Hugh.

"What about brushes?"

"Please," he said, and he shifted into a higher gear. "I could make those in my sleep.

Dad followed his I’m-So-Disappointed speech with a lecture on career opportunities.
“You’re going to study literature and get a job doing what?” he said. “Literaturizing?