David Sedaris Quotes

I'll never stop doing stand-up. There's nothing better than getting in front of 2,500 people and making an entire room laugh.

I'm traveling the world, ripping rooms apart with my stupendous comedy.

I always wanted to be a stand-up comedian, even as a kid. Me and my dad would watch 'Evening at the Improv' on A&E.

You have to do stand-up quite a long time before you learn how to do it well. It was probably years before I was confident enough in stand-up that I was able to talk about the things I wanted to talk about, the way I wanted to talk about them.

I enjoy stand-up because it has the biggest reward: instant gratification. You can hear the people laughing.

I think right now is the best time for stand-up, ever. I sincerely do.

The really good stand up comedians can be angry but relatable, and they have interestingly humanizing personalities. Their observational skills are far greater than mine, so I'll just stick to reading lines off a page.

I like to do talk show appearances where I get to just be myself, and I do stand-up where I can completely be myself. That's what I've always loved the most, of anything.

I just always loved stand-up. It's like magic. You say something, and a whole room full of people laughs together. Say something else, they laugh again. The fact that people come to see that and participate in that... I don't know, it's just like magic.

Don't you understand how dramatic it is to be a comic? To be a fool, to get people to laugh at this show-off? Milton Berle could take Laurence Olivier and stick him under the table if he wanted to. And so could I.

You know, stand-up comedy is where I pretty much started out.

The comedian just wants to get a laugh.

Live stand-up is my thing. I love being on stage and just messing around.

I love standing at a microphone and making a room of people laugh. That's the part of the work I love; everything else is extraneous.

I really, really love stand-up.

I'm not a natural comic, I don't think. That's why I gave up stand-up. It was hard. It involved a lot of death. Dying. Dying on stage. But it's one of those jobs you can only learn by doing it.

I think anybody in front of a crowd is a comedian.

I'm trying to be a comedian, you know?

With comedians, you have that understanding that we're trying to get laughs.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

I can work as a writer, but I wanted to do stand-up.

It's fun to do something funny and have the director laughing. It makes you feel good.

Jackie Gleason said that comedy is the most exacting form of dramatic art, because it has an instant critic: laughter.

The thing about stand-ups is you can't really get good unless you're failing in front of a large number of people. That makes stand-up comedy unique: you need a tremendous amount of reserve within you to take the rejection from the audience, and without it, you can't do anything.

It's good to be funny when you are a comedian.