Literary Birthday – 26 December – David Sedaris

Happy Birthday, David Sedaris, born 26 December 1956.

10 Quotes

1. I like to reserve the right to write about whatever I like.
2. Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realise it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.
3. I don’t write about sex because it’s not really my subject. I love it when other people write about it, but it’s not my subject, and I don’t want anyone I’ve had sex with to write about it. Plus, you’re in front of an audience, and they picture wherever you’re writing about. I’m 52; no one in the audience wants to picture that.
4. If you read somebody’s diary, you get what you deserve.
5. I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.
6. But I don’t distinguish between being laughed with, and laughed at. I’ll take either.
7. I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.
8. I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein’s monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn’t look at him the same way again.
9. If you’re looking for sympathy you’ll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.
10. I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn’t like it, and changed.

David Sedaris is an American Grammy Award-nominated humourist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. His collections of stories and essays include Naked,  Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_Sedaris-4724.jpg

Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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