David Sedaris Quotes

When I think about what part of my college experience came back in my work experience, I feel like it was learning how to read deeper, learning how to keep filling the movie up with more and more resonance.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Something that's interesting is how my perspective on different events can change over time even though the events themselves haven't changed. As I get older, I interpret something differently, or I can even interpret a person differently.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

The cards always look different when it's your turn to play them; loaded with subtly different possibilities.

We see, not change of aspect, but change of interpretation.

Everybody wants to make a difference, but nobody wants to be different. And you simply cannot have one without the other.

The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything.

Axl and I came from completely different backgrounds. Because of that we made an interesting pair trying to figure each other out.

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you're ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can. Then, perhaps, you will come back to it when you're older, and you will find the book has changed because you have changed as well, and the book is wiser, or more foolish, because you are wiser or more foolish than you were as a child.

Observing and understanding are two different things.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

I never write with any kind of message, and I don't think that this book, 'Goodbye, Stranger' has a message in the capital M form of the word but I do hope it makes people ask themselves questions about what they think.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

Explanations are clear but since no one to whom a thing is explained can connect the explanations with what is really clear, therefore clear explanations are not clear.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

Oftentimes, what you wind up learning is very different than what you expect.

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.

By the time I came to do the final ones [Harry Potter's film], I was working on something that was massively successful. There was a huge difference in indulgence and all sorts of stuff. A very big difference in peoples' attitudes. They were very pleased with themselves. In human terms, it was quite interesting to see the difference.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.