David Sedaris citations

“Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.”

“If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?”

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

“I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”

“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.”

“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.”

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

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.”

“All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

“It's just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”

“This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.”

“Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.”

“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.”

“I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.”

“Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?”

“High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don't wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away, I'll just deal with it when I get there.”

“I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.”

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”

“It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America.”

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

“I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.”

“The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.”

“It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.”