Quote

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.

David Sedaris

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David Sedaris
Age: 67
Born: 1956
Born: December 26
Comedian
Essayist
Humorist
Writer
Binghamton
New York
David Raymond Sedaris
World
Finally
Fork
Asked
Forks
Friend
Stared
Writer
Francisco
Longer
Bows
Moments
Frank
Look
Ties
Erection
Looks
Straight
Announces

More quotes by David Sedaris

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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.
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You really burden the reader if you put things in but, Oh, it's not interesting, but I'll put it in anyway. Then the reader's going to think, like, Mmm... no thanks. So the thing is to cut all that stuff out before its published.
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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.
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Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.
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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.
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A lot of people don't know what they want, you know, or they're just kind of vague about it.
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... [I] recall thinking that the computer would never advance much further than this. Call me naïve, but I seemed to have underestimated the universal desire to sit in a hard plastic chair and stare at a screen until your eyes cross.
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I don't think my life is more interesting than anybody else's.
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Sometimes you read something and it's just -- it doesn't invite a reader....Sometimes you read something and it's not saying, 'oh come in, come in have a seat. I'm going to tell you what happened.' Perhaps my writing comes off as conversational...and that takes effort.
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If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding.
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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.
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When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean?
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All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.
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I'm glad that I didn't have the Internet when I started writing. I started writing when I was 20 and didn't show a word of it to anyone until I was 28. I had the sense to keep it to myself. Now the temptation with blogs and such, they're just getting it out there maybe it would have been best to keep it to themselves.
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Most people, or at least most of the people that I've come into contact with, would like to be written about.
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But instead I am applying for a job as an elf. Even worse than applying is the very real possibility that I will not be hired, that I couldn't even find work as an elf. That's when you know you're a failure.
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In Japanese and Italian, the response to [How are you?] is I'm fine, and you? In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by Not so good.
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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.
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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.
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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.
David Sedaris