David Sedaris Quotes - Page 4

My boyfriend got me a computer three years ago. I'll admit it does make things a lot easier. When I was working on a typewriter and I whited out a line, often I would choose a word to go in the space just because it fit. Now I don't have to do that.

I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.

It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.

Einstein wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That said, is it crazier to repeatedly throw yourself against a window, or to repeatedly open that window, believing the creatures that are throwing themselves against it might come into your house, take a look around, and leave with no hard feelings?

In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience.

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

My feet are completely flat, but for most of my life they were still shaped like feet. Now, thanks to bunions, they're shaped more like states, wide boring ones that nobody wants to drive through.

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?'

I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there; maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.

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.

In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. ‘I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,’ they say. ‘Phoebe Wallingford will pay for what she’s done to our family.’ Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder, I turned to look in the direction of Hugh’s loft. ‘You will be mine,’ I commanded.

You know, when you need drugs and you don't have a lot of money, what you'll do is you'll hang out with people who will give you drugs. Right?

But most good movies have a gun in them.

Hugh returned from his trip, and days later I still sounded like a Red Chinese asking questions about the democratic hinterlands. "And you actually saw people smoking in restaurants? Really! And offices, too? Oh, tell me again about the ashtrays in the hospital waiting room, and don't leave anything out."

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

“This is hurting me a lot more than it’s hurting you,” he said. It was his standard line, but I knew that this time he was right. Worse than the boil was the stuff that came out of it. What got to me, and got to him even worse, was the stench, which was unbearable, and unlike anything I had come across before. It was, I thought, what evil must smell like - not an evil person but the wicked ideas that have made him that way. How could a person continue to live with something so rotten inside? And so much of it!

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.

As a foreigner in London, I like that there are so many other foreigners.

I gave my mother a matching set [of mugs] for Christmas, and she accepted them as graciously as possible, announcing that they would make the perfect pet bowls. The mugs were set on the kitchen floor and remained there until the cat chipped a tooth and went on a hunger strike.

Jeremy, Good luck on your first marriage.

For as long as I can remember, my father saved. He saves money, he saves disfigured sticks that resemble disfigured celebrities, and most of all, he saves food. Cherry tomatoes, sausage biscuits, the olives plucked from other people's martinis --he hides these things in strange places until they are rotten. And then he eats them.

It make one's mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment.

My sister Tiffany told me years ago, 'You can never write about me.' Then she called six months ago and said she wanted to be in a story. She was worried people thought I didn't like her.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.