David Sedaris Quotes: 20

• If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.

  Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

• Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.

  When You Are Engulfed in Flames

• Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

• Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

• We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.

  Naked

• When I look at a lot of older stuff that I've written, I think one sign of amateur humor writing is when you see people trying too hard.

• If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

• Hugh and I have been together for so long that in order to arouse extraordinary passion, we need to engage in physical combat. Once, he hit me on the back of the head with a broken wineglass, and I fell to the floor pretending to be unconscious. That was romantic, or would have been had he rushed to my side rather than stepping over my body to fetch the dustpan.

  Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

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

• A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

• I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

• When asked "What do we need to learn this for?"any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

• I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met.

• 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.

• At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

• All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.

• The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

• The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you'll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don't understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

  Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

• but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

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

  Naked