Quotes from David Sedaris

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize that I was fooled into thinking I'd written the story. I hadn't—I had just typed for a long time. So then I have to carve out a story from the 25 or so pages. It's in there somewhere—but I have to find it. I'll then write a third, fourth, and fifth draft, and so on.

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.

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.

Oh, offensive jokes…when, if ever, will your time come around again?

At twenty-two, you are built for poverty and rejection. And you know why? Because you're good-looking. You might not realize it this morning, but thirty years from now, you will pull out pictures of yourself taken on this day and think, Why did nobody tell me I was so fucking attractive? You maybe can't see it now because you're comparing yourself to the person next to you, or two rows up. But you are stunning.

Someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels. What made this exceptionally disturbing was that all our towels were fudge-colored. You'd be drying your hair when, too late, you noticed an unmistakable odor on your hands, head, and face.

Walking twenty-five miles, or even running up the stairs and back, suddenly seemed pointless, since without the steps being counted and registered, what use were they?

The thing to remeber is that more than anything in this world, these colored people wish they were white.

Her expression changed then, becoming fearful rather than merely pained. It was the look you get when facing a sudden and insurmountable danger: the errant truck, the shakey ladder, the crazy person who pins you to the linoleum and insists, with increasing urgency, that everything you know and love can be undone by a grape.

We're like a pair of bad trapeze artists, reaching for each other's hands and missing every time

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.

A young couple strolls by, the adoration of one bouncing off the tolerance of the other.

What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion.

Then the flight attendants, garbage bags in hand, glided down the aisle, looking each one of us square in the face and whispering, without discrimination, "Your trash. You're trash. Your family's trash.

Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.

Dad wants to talk about her death—he needs to—but unlike the rest of us, who yak incessantly about our feelings, he has no vocabulary for it and is reduced to the clichés you'd find on a sympathy card. It's like not knowing a language.

He sounded like me when I sensed there were drugs around: All I know is that if someone wants to get high, or wants to watch while I smoke his dope, I'll do it. I really will.

It's not lost on me that I'm so busy recording life, I don't have time to really live it. I've become like one of those people I hate, the sort who go to the museum and, instead of looking at the magnificent Brueghel, take a picture of it, reducing it from art to proof. It's not "Look what Brueghel did, painted this masterpiece" but "Look what I did, went to Rotterdam and stood in front of a Brueghel painting!

she was the human equivalent of a storm cloud.

Later that night I met a Bulgarian. "In my country, you say to someone you hate, 'May you build a house from your kidney stones.'" Well, finally, I thought.

The Bible says that it's all right to cast the first stone if someone dead is telling you to do it

I like the kind of man John is. He watches things closely and then does nothing with the information.

I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost it in my family

Bitch, I'm here to tell you that it's going to be all right. We'll get through this shit, motherfucker, just you wait.