David Sedaris quotes:

It's odd the things that people remember. Parents will arrange a birthday party, certain it will stick in your mind forever. You'll have a nice time, then two years later you'll be like, 'There was a pony there? Really? And a clown with one leg?'

After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.

I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the 'Harry Potter' books.

I love getting attention, just like a child loves it, and it's never worn off. So when people say, oh the book signings go on, why would I shoo away someone who's giving me attention? What part of standing in line for 10 hours to say how much they love you is bad to you?

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.

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

Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.

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.

People ask me, 'Have you ever considered doing stand-up?' To me it would be less offensive if someone asked me, 'Have you ever considered dental implants?'

I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I'm pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.

On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind.

I love 'Glee.' I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it okay to cry.

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

What other people call dark and despairing, I call funny.

I don't like being left to my own thoughts.

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin "Tubby" Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole.

I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.

I've maintained old friendships, like with people I knew in the nineteen-seventies, but have lost the knack for meeting new people. This has a lot to do with my writing schedule. I don't want to be disturbed, and the willingness to be disturbed is, I think, part of being a good friend.

I like listening to books as well, as that way you can iron at the same time.

I just enjoy lying on the couch and reading a magazine.

I go to the movies at least five times a week, and after a while everything becomes a blur to me.

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.

In books and movies infidelity always looks so compelling, so right. Here are people who defy petty convention and are rewarded with only the tastiest bits of human experience.

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.

Also, I used to think that one day I might get someone to iron my shirts, but the truth is I really like doing them myself.

I always think it's a good policy to like the people who like you.

My family isn't really all that different from anyone else's. Well, maybe they're a bit more entertaining.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

The message was that if something is free, you should only take the best. If, on the other hand, you're forced to pay, it's best to lower the bar and not be so choosy.

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'.

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.

Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy.

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.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

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.

My sister's the type who religiously watches the fear segments of her local Eyewitness News broadcasts, retaining nothing but the headline...Everything is dangerous all of the time, and if it's not yet been pulled off the shelves, then it's certainly under investigation -- so there.

Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.

But most good movies have a gun in them.

A week after my drugs ran out, I left my bed to perform at the college, deciding at the last minute to skip both the doughnut toss and the march of the headless plush toys. Instead, I just heated up a skillet of plastic soldiers, poured a milkshake over my head and called it a night.

Sallie Mae sounds like a naive and barefoot hillbilly girl but in fact they are a ruthless and aggressive conglomeration of bullies located in a tall brick building somewhere in Kansas. I picture it to be the tallest building in that state and I have decided they hire their employees straight out of prison.

But I'm a humorist. I'm not a reporter, I never pretended to be a reporter.

I've always been very upfront about the way I write, and I've always used the tools humorists use, such as exaggeration.

I've never made up events, but I've always been a big exaggerator. It's written on my humorist license that I'm allowed to do that.

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

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.

Of course, the diary helps me as well. 'That wasn't your position on July 7, 1991,' I'll remind Hugh an hour after we've had a fight. I'd have loved to rebut him sooner, but it takes awhile to look these things up.

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

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

If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?

I've often lost faith in myself, I've never lost it in my family

Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.

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

I cry all the time when I watch 'Glee' because I don't know if it's satire or melodrama and that makes me feel like the writing is aware of itself, and that makes it OK to cry.

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

In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two houres and they go over the edge.

A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.

They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.

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.

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it.

Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.

The combination of ammonia and chloride can be lethal but I've discovered it can work miracles as long as you keep telling yourself, "I want to love, I want to live...

Look at yourself on the day that you graduated from college, then look at yourself today. I did that recently and it was like, 'Yikes! What the hell happened?

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

Certain motherfuckers think they can fuck with my shit, but you can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up some times, but, bitch, nobody kills the motherfucking Rooster. You know what I'm saying?

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

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.

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 think there is a difference between comic essays and war reporting, and people can tell that.

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.

It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.

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

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them.

My first semester I had only nine students. Hoping they might view me as professional and well prepared, I arrived bearing name tags fashioned in the shape of maple leaves.

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

College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking..

Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.

If I'm riding my bike I just replay the same scenarios over and over in my head, like I haven't had a new mental adventure since high school. So that's what I like about books on tape, so my mind can't wander anywhere.

Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.

Neighbors would pass, and when they honked I'd remember that I was in my Speedo. Then I'd wrap my towel like a skirt around my waist and remind my sisters that this was not girlish but Egyptian, thank you very much.

Hugh consoled me, saying, "Don't let it get to you. There are plenty of things you're good at." When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he'll need some time to think.

What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don't normally sneak up on people. Unless they've derailed, you pretty much know where to find them.

The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.

Perhaps the little Negro girl was holding a concealed razor blade. Maybe she was one of the troublemakers out for a fresh white scalp.

Paul Rudnick is a champion of truth (and love and great wicked humor) whom we ignore at our peril.

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

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

If you are any kind of an artist, then validation . . . can be a result, but you're going to do the work anyway.

Actually I liked that 'Let the Right One In,' that Swedish vampire movie.

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.

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

I've been keeping a diary for thirty-three years and write in it every morning. Most of it's just whining, but every so often there'll be something I can use later: a joke, a description, a quote. It's an invaluable aid when it comes to winning arguments. 'That's not what you said on February 3, 1996,' I'll say to someone.

People ask if I miss it, but they don't understand that American culture is so ubiquitous that there's nothing to miss. I don't see myself moving back. It's not that I hate the United States. I just always thought it would be a shame not to live in a foreign country.

To say that a humorist exaggerates to get big laughs, I don't see how that's big news.

I meet people at book signings. My record now, for signing, is ten and a half hours in one sitting.

But I don't distinguish between being laughed with, and laughed at. I'll take either.

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.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

I like nonfiction books about people with wretched lives.

Do I exaggerate? Boy, do I, and I'd do it more if I could get away with it.

As a foreigner in London, I like that there are so many other foreigners.

I sometimes read books on my iPad.

I think it's important to take chances.

If you read somebody's diary, you get what you deserve.

Because I've always been a fairly nervous person.

I always say to young people, "Get the hell out of the United States." Especially if you're young, like if you're 21 or something. Let's say you don't speak any Italian. You're 21. Everyone's going to want to sleep with you and be nice to you. And the best way to learn a language is to sleep with someone from that country.

This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.

I think I became a better writer after I started writing for the New Yorker. Well, I know I did. And part of it was having my New Yorker editor and part of it is that was when I started really going on tour and reading things in front of an audience 30 times and then going back in the room and rewriting it and reading it and rewriting it. So you really get the rhythm of the sentences down and you really get the flow down and you get rid of stuff that's not important.

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.

There are a lot of college writing textbooks that will include essays and short stories, and after reading the story or essay, there will be questions such as "Have YOU Had any experience with a pedophile in YOUR family?" or "When was the last time you saw YOUR mother drunk?" and they're just really good at prompting stories. You answer the question, and sometimes that can spring into a story.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

It didn't seem fair to me that Jon Stewart's rally didn't get the same kind of attention that Glenn Beck's did. Why was Beck's seen as checking the thermometer of the country, and Jon Stewart just dismissed as a satirist?

The difference between the first time I read something and the tenth time I read something is generally pretty profound. Even if the script is the same, just the way that I read it is different.

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

I don't like to read anything on the radio for the very first time, because I don't have any notion of a reaction. When I read it out loud, then I get an idea of that, and more of an idea of how to read.

I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.