David Sedaris Quotes

To me and my kind life itself is a story and we have to tell it in stories - that is the way it falls.

I think that everything in this life is a story you know; our own narrative, our own history, it's all a story.

Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they become the bleached bones of a story.

Everybody's got one killer story. It doesn't take talent to tell that story, it just takes experience.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

I think there are some stories that need to be told by a specific person as opposed to in the third person.

I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller

We are reading the story of our lives As though we were in it As though we had written it.

The world was more than a place. Life was more than an event. It was all one thing, and that thing was: story.

We have to trust that our stories deserve to be told. We may discover that the better we tell our stories the better we will want to live them.

A poet must discover that it’s his own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.

The story itself, the true story, is the one that the audience members create in their minds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed, elucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own experience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.

A memoir is a book about some particular thread or theme or moment in a person's life, whereas an autobiography is the entire life.

When you are eighty years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices.

I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.

There is a narrative to every life, and I believe in the classic mode of storytelling that goes back to Homer and carries through to today.

Our stories can set us free. When we set them free.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact.

We can only connect the dots we collect, which makes everything you write about you... your connections are the thread that you weave into the cloth that becomes the story that only you can tell.

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.

Living "in" a story, being part of a narrative, is much more satisfying than living without one. I don't always know what narrative it is, because I'm living my life and not always reflecting on it, but as I edit these pages I am aware that I have an urge to see my sometimes random wandering as having a plot, a purpose guided by some underlying story.

She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.

I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there.