David Sedaris

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measur...”

“For the first twenty years of my life, I rocked myself to sleep. It was a harmless enough hobby, but eventually, I had to give it up. Throughout the next twenty-two years I lay still and dis...”

“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.”

“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 wit...”

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

“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 ad...”

“When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll mer...”

“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...”

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

“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...”

“The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.”

“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 be...”

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

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