Quotes from David Sedaris

Over time I grew accustomed to the sight of a friend's colostomy bag and came to think of Kent State as something of an I.V. League university. The state would pay your board if you roomed with

the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

Most movies and TV shows get drugs wrong. Someone takes a bong hit and spends the next few hours laughing uncontrollably. Someone takes acid and steps into the Sergeant Pepper cover. Six Feet Under gets drugs right, so after taking the mushrooms, Claire and her friend hole up in the bedroom, using the sewing machine and wishing they lived in the nineteenth century.

Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I've been hoisting for the past sixty years.

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!

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.

It's astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex—trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it.

You'll be talking to him and he'll walk away—not angry but just sort of finished with you.

No one had a houseful of servants or a trained proboscis monkey, yet we'd turned out OK, hadn't we?

My neighborhood is known for its old rich people and, subsequently, its hospitals. The closest of them now had a refrigerated truck parked outside in which dead bodies were being stored.

We've gotten ourselves a mortgage broker named Marcus Paisley, a man we obviously chose for his name. Hugh spoke to him yesterday morning and we spent the rest of the day imagining future calls. "I'm starting to see a pattern here, Paisley, and I don't like it.

You'd think I'd have addressed my drinking, at least in the privacy of my diary, but it's rarely mentioned. To type that word—alcoholic—would have made it real, so I never recounted the talking-tos I got from Hugh and certain helpful people in my family.

In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there's American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you're in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don't need to hand out bribes in order to get

what you need. That spark you feel when an idea comes to you—This could work. I can actually make this happen!—is Western privilege as well. It may not be certainty, but it's hope, and if you think that's worthless, try living in a place where nobody has it. Worse still, try getting a decent hotel room there.

Roger Donald called from Little Brown to say that he would like to negotiate a two-book deal. To celebrate, I bought a denim shirt, and thought it amazing how quickly one's life can change. I never thought I'd want a denim shirt.

The Times came last night; tonight it was Newsday and the Voice. I want to tell them we were just joking. It's not a real play, it's what comes from doodling while you're holding a bong.

No matter how angry I get, it always comes down to this: I'm going to leave and then what? Move in with my dad? Thirty minutes of pure rage, and when I finally spot him I realize that I've never been so happy to see anyone in my life. "There you are," I say. And when he asks where I have been, I answer honestly and tell him I was lost.

some cigarettes and when I returned she sat me down to discuss the Winter Olympics. "Did you see it on the TV? That Tonya Harding? I never liked her. She's a street fighter is what she is, a dirty snot. Nancy Kerrigan I like, but not that street fighter." Tonya Harding really is something else. I resisted the story until I saw a picture of her. With her fierce makeup, she looks like a child's drawing of an angry babysitter.

he's very good to old people, a group that in the not-too-distant future will include me.

the man with one hand turned on an enormous radio and tuned it to a mastermix station where the songs are not sung so much as bleated. Bleated and repeated.

If you're not cute, at least be clever.

May 9, 1989 Again this year I made Mom a Mother's Day card. It reads: M is for the Morbid things you showed me, O is for the Other things you did T is for the Thousand bucks you owe me H is for things you found I Hid E is for the Error of my caring R is for the Ranch house you call home Mother dear, I wish that you had shown me How to shave and how to use a comb.

He shrugged, Dutchily.

No matter where you go, you cannot escape the Bee Gees