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I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.

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
Things
Rather
Like
Jobs
Fathom
People
Someone
Sounding
Seems
Convert
Wells
Missionary
Come
Whose
Well
Listen
Important
Seem

More quotes by David Sedaris

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Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.
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I would be writing and trying to write like Joan Didion. Or if I was reading Raymond Carver. You know, strong stylists. But that's how you find your voice, is imitating other people. So things like that didn't embarrass me, because I thought, well, that's how it goes. That's how everyone learns.
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Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.
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I don't really do very well when I'm sent somewhere. A lot of magazines want to send you somewhere to do something. They want you to stow away on a ship, or something like that.
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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.
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I sometimes read books on my iPad.
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The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.
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The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.
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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.
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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.
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Now, I like a church service, but this was one of those write-your-own-vows sorts of things. Neither of them had ever picked up a pen in their life, but all of a sudden they’re poets, right, like that’s all it takes — being in love.
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The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.
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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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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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Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.
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Maybe one day, I would write a story about arguing in public, and those would come in handy in some way.
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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.
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I'm not afraid to write about madness. I always figure that whatever most embarrasses you is something that everyone can relate to, really...because we're just not that different. So if you think, 'Oh my god, this is so embarrassing. I can't possibly talk about that,' and you write about it, the audience is gonna be like, 'that happened to me!
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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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Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.
David Sedaris