David Sedaris Quotes

I'm not on a record like some rapper trying to boast about my clothes or where I'm from. I'm creating stories, experiences, the way places make me feel, the way a person makes me feel.

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

I always kept a diary - not a diary like, 'Dear Diary, we got up at 5 A.M., and I wore the weird hair again and that white dress! Hi-yeee!' I'd just write.

I do think I was trying to entertain the reader more than I was trying to purge myself.

I write about personal experiences.

I was writing for myself, not to be published. I was writing diaries, even letters, to myself or to anyone I was angry at. Sometimes they weren't to a person, they were just to the universe - a bit like penning daydreams or isolated thoughts.

My best writing has always been in journals.

If I am unhappy, I can write "damn it" in my personal diary, but I can't do that on a microblog so I might as well not start one.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.

Recently I began reading my old diaries. Back to before the war. Gradually I became very depressed. The reason for that is probably that I wrote only when there were obstacles and halts to the flow of life, seldom when everything was smooth and even. ... As I read I distinctly felt what a half-truth a diary presents.

There’s an assumption that if someone writes in the first person it’s self-indulgent and self-regarding. I just look at it as a tool to understand the world and my experience in it. It’s not a tool to understand myself.

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

The very idea of printing my diary has always struck me as completely superficial.

To keep a diary is to attempt a difficult literary form. Its effectiveness is likely to derive from a special blend of honesty and appetite for life that gives the power to record everyday happenings while magically freeing them from banality and triviality.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

Besides the drugs and counterculture, I started talking about myself, which is the first thing you do when you are a writer.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

I don't worry about being exposed. When I'm writing about myself I think about myself as a character. There is a ton of stuff going on in my life that I don't write about. If I need to write that stuff down, I write about myself in my diary.

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.

To be a good diarist, one must have a snouty, sneaky mind.

when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life?

[Kurt] Vonnegut was a writer whose great gift was that he always seemed to be talking directly to you. He wasn't writing, he wasn't showing off, he was just telling you, nobody else, what it was like, what it was all about. That intimacy made him beloved. We can admire the art of John Updike or Philip Roth, but we love Vonnegut.