Quotes from David Sedaris

Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It's also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I've begged them to leave.

Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.

At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.

In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl'.

The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.... I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I'm comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide...My mom was actually jealous.

This grown man who now phones his father to say, Motherfucker, I ain't seen pussy so long, I'd throw stones at it.

Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.

she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn't that much of a stretch

There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.

There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.

I can't promise I'll never kill anyone again, he once said, strapping a refrigerator to his back. It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters

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

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

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.

there's a reason regular people don't appear on TV: we're boring.

When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of jazz as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.

I've always had a way with the little people, making it a point to humor them without looking down my nose at their wasted empty lives.

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

After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading," I often say to Hugh. "I promise that on the next page you'll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.

The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.

He's as nutty as a vegan T-bone.

He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father. He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples. He nice, the Jesus.