Quotes About Judgment

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.

Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems were for alcoholics, and Mores were for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren't.

It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.

May I bring you a drink to go with those warm nuts, Mr. Sedaris? this woman looking after me asked - this as the people in coach were still boarding. The looks they gave me as they passed were the looks I give when the door of a limousine opens. You always expect to see a movie star, or, at the very least, some better dressed than you, but time and time again it's just a sloppy nobody. Thus the look, which translates to, Fuck you, Sloppy Nobody, for making me turn my head.

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!

As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

He has a passport, my classmates would whisper. Quick, let's run before he judges us!

At what point had I realized that class couldn't save you, that addiction or mental illness didn't care whether you'd taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe?

My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for _who_ I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for _what_ you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven't got the slightest idea of how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.

If you don't want to marry a homosexual, then don't. But what gives you the right to weigh in on your neighbor's options? It's like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.

If you see devils, they lock you up, but in America, if you see angels, they put you on morning TV.

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

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

I wanted to be perfect," he said over dinner. "I…need to be perfect." It's such a burden to place on yourself. Say you are perfect—who's going to recognize it? Few things are like the Olympics, where judges hold up score cards. How does one paint perfectly? Or lawyer perfectly? The key is to fill the space between your skill level and perfection with charm. That said, you can't do it consciously. Charm can't be constructed that way.

If you read an essay in Esquire and don't like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it's in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don't like it, there's something wrong with you.

Nothing irritated her more than these high-and-mighty vegetarians who ate meat sometimes and then decided that it didn't really count.

At what point had I realized that class couldn't save you, that addiction or mental illness didn't care whether you'd taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?

The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready-- so who was she to advise me on anything?

Question: What's the difference between a whore and a bitch? Answer: A whore will sleep with anybody. A bitch will sleep with anybody… but you.

Some people, I thought, opening the wet wipes so I could wash the tumor off my hands before I touched my wallet.

It's as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, Ick, who are you?

Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn't care who they had sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark. It's the next morning you have to worry about—the name-calling, the slamming of doors, the charge that you somehow cast a spell.

It's common to be misread by people who don't know you.