David Sedaris Quotes

Once food gets into our fridges, larders and kitchens, ensuring that it gets used up before going off seems like an obvious thing to do - but it's alarming how many millions of tonnes are simply chucked because we don't keep track of the food we've spent our money on.

Well, I've got a color telly, and a fridge. I've got some pork chops in the fridge, but the chops keep going off, so I have to keep buying more.

[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed.

The least practical of us have some petty thrift dear to our hearts, some one direction in which we love to scrimp.

Leftovers make you feel good twice. First, when you put it away, you feel thrifty and intelligent: 'I'm saving food!' Then a month later when blue hair is growing out of the ham, and you throw it away, you feel really intelligent: 'I'm saving my life!'

Acquire Riches by Industry and Frugality.

You can become rich by being cheap but the problem is that even though you are rich, you are still cheap

Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher economy. Economy is a distinctive virtue, and consists not in saving, but in selection.

I'm a collector - I collect everything. I can't throw things away. For some reason I think I'm going to need tiny wooden teddy bears with their arms hacked off.

The miser and the glutton are two facetious buzzards: one hides his store, and the other stores his hide.

CLOSE-FISTED, adj. Unduly desirous of keeping that which many meritorious persons wish to obtain.

Miserliness is the one vice that grows stronger with increasing years. It yields its sordid pleasures to the end.

We tried it again and it didn't work out. Sour milk is always sour milk. When something goes bad it stays bad.You don't put sour milk in the refrigerator one day,and take it out the next and expect it to taste sweet.

You would open a drawer, which my father had jammed full of newspapers, and the bottom would drop out. There were buttons and screws and nails and bottle caps and jar lids – the drawer of jar lids! Why? Because they're made of metal and maybe there'll be another war and we'll need the metal. A friend of mine – I quote him in the book – says, 'You have found the source of the river eBay.'

Niggards are oftentimes neat.

My father died when I was two years old. But my mother was quite capable. She raised three children with his war pension which was peanuts. Yet we did not want for anything. We grew up with a certain parsimony, which is a nice thing. Then if life gives you more good, otherwise you get used to. I'm still thrifty.

Sam Snead will fly anywhere in my plane with me. Sam's not as worried about the danger as he is about saving money.

The miser robs himself.

My parents were hoarders before hoarding was cool

There's only one degree of freshness — the first, which makes it also the last

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.

The thrifty maxim of the wary Dutch, Is to save all the Money they can touch

A penny saved is twopence dear; A pin a day 's a groat a year.

[My mother] once cooked a ham and later found it in my father's shirt drawer. I am not kidding.

Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to begin with.