David Sedaris Quotes

I cannot wait until the day I can go back to school... I've already picked my program: anthropology at Columbia. I will not get in, but a girl can dream.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

I expected to go into journalism or law.

I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

From age 16 on, I found school boring and failed A-level Physics at my first attempt. This was necessary for university entrance, and so I stayed an extra year to repeat it. This time, I did splendidly and was admitted to Sheffield University, my first choice because of their excellent Chemistry Department.

Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.

I started writing more with my voice in mind.

I'd like to take a course in writing. I'm not the best writer in the world. I'd like to write more neatly, even though people don't send many handwritten letters these days.

My elder brother is a lecturer in a college in Haryana, and my eldest sister was a teacher. I feel they are more educated than I am. I, too, used to dream of becoming a teacher.

I believe an editor's job is to help a writer sound like himself or herself.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

Finding out whether I had made the grades for my first choice university course or whether I needed to rethink my future was terrifying.

They were saying you would be a tremendous addition to the military, and we can get you into West Point with a full scholarship. And I simply said, I want to be a doctor. I really appreciate it.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

As a man lives and thinks, so he will write.

But my way of writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my own humours, than much to consider who is listening to me; and, if I stop to consider what is proper to be said to this or that person, I shall soon come to doubt whether any part at all is proper.

I think that I speak a lot like I write.

When I'm writing, especially when I'm writing in first person, I don't think about the characterization, or how they are going to express themselves, I just express my own approach to these things. I think most writers can never divorce themselves from their private lives and personas; they are the ones that are writing. And the more they remove themselves from their own persona, the more, perhaps, mechanical the work becomes.

Style is what's there when you look at someone's writing and you know that they wrote it and nobody else did.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

I don't enjoy lettering very much, but that's the way I write and that belongs in the strip because the strip is a reflection of me.

I just wanted to be a guy on the radio and I wanted to succeed, and I wanted a situation where I could be honest.

You should really stay true to your own style. When I first started writing, everybody said to me, 'Your style just isn't right because you don't use the really flowery language that romances have.' My romances - compared to what's out there - are very strange, very odd, very different. And I think that's one of the reasons they're selling.