David Rakoff Quotes & Sayings

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. — David Rakoff

I don't particularly consider myself an actor. I have no training. I love doing it, but I would never consider myself to be a colleague of an actual actor. That would be stepping way up in class on my part. — David Rakoff

Susan adored her and worshiped her style, / Loved her pronouncements of "perfect" and "vile," / Loved the sheer whim, the madcap willy-nillyness / And how deeply seriously Nonnie took her own silliness — David Rakoff

It bears repeating a third time: Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humour does. — David Rakoff

Details can change or go missing entirely, particularly in moments of physical peril. A kind of amnesia goes hand in hand with sickness, and a good thing, too. — David Rakoff

The overriding sense of Tokyo ... is that it is a city devoted to the new, sped up in a subtle but profound way: a postmodern science-fiction story set ten minutes in the future. — David Rakoff

Lenny Bruce described flamenco as being an art form wherein a dancer applauds his own ass. — David Rakoff

I cannot escape the feeling that I was, at best, a cancer tourist, that my survival means I dabbled. — David Rakoff

In the right situation, highly formalized, high-suction ass-kissing not only comes all too naturally to me, it makes me breathless with a feeling of penitential power. — David Rakoff

Before I sat down and became a writer, before I began to do it habitually and for my living, there was a decades-long stretch when I was terrified that it would suck, so I didn't write. I think that marks a lot of people, a real terror at being bad at something, and unfortunately, you are always bad before you can get a little better. — David Rakoff

To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it's the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be prettiest. — David Rakoff

New York is breaking my heart. I've often said that it's like having a really interesting boyfriend suddenly becoming really, really into wine, and having to have endless conversations about it. — David Rakoff

I aspire to write what are called 'familiar essays.' They begin in the personal and end in the universal. It's not for me to say if I have been successful at it. But that is the hope. — David Rakoff

Arts and crafts, or getting to be in a play with people, or making a little short film, that's pure sugar, because the stakes are so low. — David Rakoff

Without the work, there is nothing. — David Rakoff

It has been a good while since 12:00 a.m. held much attraction for me beyond being a perfectly lovely time to be ensconced in the comfort of my own home, sitting in my underpants, contentedly worrying about something. — David Rakoff

If psychoanalysis was late-19th-century secular Judaism's way of constructing spiritual meaning in a post-religious world and retail is the late 20th century's way of constructing meaning in a postreligious world, what does it mean that I'm impersonating the father of psychoanalysis in a store window to commemorate a religious holiday? — David Rakoff

Unless one is planning to go shopping - basically begging to be smothered by the ravening throngs of returners and bargain hunters; an embrace as constricting as that hugging machine designed by autistic author Temple Grandin - then Boxing Day feels like a bar after last call when the lights have been turned up. — David Rakoff

But if one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder. — David Rakoff

There is supercomputer somewhere in the Nevada desert whose sole function is to count the number of times that I have said the following, because it is unquantifiable by human minds at this point, but this time it's really true: I should have stayed home. — David Rakoff

My salvation lies in time spent alone with an X-Acto knife and commercial-grade adhesive. — David Rakoff

One day Satan himself visits, along with his great-grandmother - who is, not surprisingly, a total fucking bitch. — David Rakoff

Taking both of Kay's hands with no rancor, no bile,
Helen looks in her eyes and breaks into a smile.
"You're right", Helen says, "I should call it a day."
Helen smiles one more time, and them adds, "Fuck off, Kay. — David Rakoff

I think what it means is that central to living A life that is good is a life that's forgiving. — David Rakoff

One, two, three, four, we don't want your fuckin' laws of thermodynamics! — David Rakoff

I find life itself provides ample and sufficient tests of my valor and mettle: illness; betrayal; fruitless searches for love; working for the abusive, the insane, and the despotic. All challenges easily as thrilling to me as scrambling over icy rock in a pair of barely adequate boots. — David Rakoff

I do tend to be an anxious fellow, and I do tend to see the world as a little darker than perhaps it genuinely is, but I also do appreciate much more than a rosy scenario, I appreciate straight news. — David Rakoff

With no small remorse, she thought, "He and his mess
Better not come near this fabulous dress". — David Rakoff

There is much in our culture to affront the eye of the fervent terrorist postulant, things out there that do us no favors, to be sure. If, for example, it came to light that the dangerously thin, affectless, value-deficient, higher aspiration-free, amateur-porn chanteuse Paris Hilton was actually a covert agent from some secret Taliban madrassa whose mission was to portray the ultimate capitalist-whore puppet of a doomed society with nothing more on its mind than servitude to Mammon and celebrity at any cost, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. — David Rakoff

Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Well, of course not Adam and Steve. Never Adam and Steve. It's Adam and Steven. — David Rakoff

People are really trying their best. Just like being happy and sad, you will find yourself on both sides of the equation many times over your lifetime, either saying or hearing the wrong thing. Let's all give each other a pass, shall we? — David Rakoff

Here's the thing: I'm not beautiful. I mean, I'm a perfectly normal-looking Jewish guy. My face has never been my fortune, nor has my body ... physical beauty has never been part of my equation. It's just not on my shopping list. — David Rakoff

Hoped if she kept the dream hidden and frozen
She soon would forget that she'd never been chosen.
But dreams screams as loud whether thriving or dying
And Helen despite herself never stopped trying. — David Rakoff

Almost any age is better than twenty-two. — David Rakoff

There's nothing particularly wrong with being more pessimistic than optimistic. Optimism is broad-based, non-detail-oriented thinking; pessimism is detail-oriented thinking. — David Rakoff

If all of the money was gone from my life,
Would you still love me?" a man asks his wife.
"Of course," she replies. "Come here, let me kiss you.
I'll love you forever, but boy would I miss you! — David Rakoff

I'm not sure. But that bless-his/her-heart kind of melancholic humor is among my favorite things in the world. I guess it exposes a kind of humanity - or that's the hope, at least - a kind of grudging respect for human frailty. Unless it's actually kicking human frailty while it's down - I'm not sure. — David Rakoff

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories. — David Rakoff

There will be peaks of great joy from which to crow and vales of tears out of which to climb. When and why they will happen, no one can say, but they will happen. To all of us. We will all go back and forth from one to the other countless times during a lifetime. This is not some call to bipartisanship between inimical sides. The Happy and the Sad are the same population. — David Rakoff

Altruism is innate, but it's not instinctual. Everybody's wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped. — David Rakoff

Is there some lesson on how to be friends?
I think what it means is that central to living
a life that is good is a life that's forgiving.
We're creatures of contact regardless of whether
we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.
Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more
since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.
So we make ourselves open while knowing full well
it's essentially saying please, come pierce my shell. — David Rakoff

Fantastic days are what you wish upon those who have so few sunrises left, those whose lungs are so lesion-spangled with new cancer that they should be embracing as much life as they can. Time's a-wasting, go out and have yourself a fantastic day! Fantastic days are for goners. — David Rakoff

When medicine is socialized, when you have true universal health care, when everyone's treatment is the same regardless of socioeconomic station, those strong-arming attitudes of entitlement just aren't part of the vocabulary. This atrium, this lovely space in a hospital with a world-class reputation, is actually the equivalent of a state hospital. That American sense that someone somewhere else is getting what you're not, and the attendant demands that go along with that perceived injustice, well, it's just not in the equation here. — David Rakoff

Let's face it: professing a deep interest in movies, the absolutely dominant global art form of the last century, is at this point like professing an interest in air. Passion is nice. Erudition is admirable. But it's like that moment when good manners cross over into meaningless etiquette. — David Rakoff

I am no fun at all. In fact, I am anti-fun. Not as in anti-violence, but as in anti-matter. I am not so much against fun - although I suppose I kind of am - as I am the opposite of fun. I suck the fun out of a room. Or perhaps I'm just a different kind of fun; the kind that leaves on bereft of hope; the kind of fun that ends in tears. — David Rakoff

There are even more galvanizing aspects to the Canadian psyche than mere reticence. There is the collective fear, at least when I was growing up, of becoming too big for our britches. To paraphrase Lorne Michaels (my countryman), it's the kind of place where they award Miss Canada to the runner-up, because the prettiest already gets to be the prettiest. Rather than demanding liberty or, failing that, death, we are a country forever giving up our seats to the elderly, all the while thanking one another for not smoking. — David Rakoff

I am the world's worst reporter. I am apt to try too hard to help rather than just document my subjects. — David Rakoff

But thanks to my rapidly dividing cells, I no longer have that feeling - although I remember it very well - that if I just buckled down to the great work at hand, lived more authentically, stopped procrastinating, cut out sugar, then my best self was just there right around the corner. Yeah, no. I'm done with all that. I — David Rakoff

We're creatures of contact regardless of whether/ we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together. — David Rakoff

Youth is not wasted on the young, it is perpetrated on the young. — David Rakoff

I will stipulate to having both French sea salt and a big bottle of extra virgin in my kitchen. And while the presence of both might go some small distance in pigeonholing me demographically, neither one of them makes me a good person. They are mute and useless indicators of the content of my character. — David Rakoff

Pessimists are born, true, but they also can be made. — David Rakoff

In the window, I fantasize ... about providing grown-ups and children alike with the greatest gift of all: insight ... — David Rakoff

I can see a great beauty in acknowledging the fact that the world is dark. — David Rakoff

It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that I almost never can when writing. — David Rakoff

I like everything," I replied, feeling misrepresented and only half amused right back. "I don't hate the world. I'm scared of it. There's a difference. — David Rakoff

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, "What can you write that hasn't been written already?"
He's absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with right now is that Lagerfeld's powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn't ... seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How's that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?
— David Rakoff

My room is cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats "Stay up! Stay up!" I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint. — David Rakoff

The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone. — David Rakoff

I am going to the bad place, as is my wont. — David Rakoff

The best=laid plans, one's most fastidious contingency strategies have revealed themselves in the cold light of day to be laughably inadequate, no match for the happenstance that seems of late only to promise death, mayhem, poverty, flood. And here you are, having spent all that time protecting your home from the oncoming elements only to find that it has been shored up with crackers. — David Rakoff

I have let half-decades elapse between books because books have to be writte and writing is awful, but if you are the type of person who makes things, there is no profit in worrying about how or why or when the next project will come into being beyond simply acknowledging that it is inevitable that it will be very soon. — David Rakoff

We are disclosing animals, wired for unburdening. It's what we do as a species. When I am being told, I listen, mindful of the honor, remembering all the while that the shore would be mistaken to believe that the waves lap up against him because he is so beautiful. — David Rakoff

One day reach idealization;
after all, it's the journey, not the destination. — David Rakoff

There are many things in this world that are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them. Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more, and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind. — David Rakoff

Everybody's got something. In the end, what choice does one really have but to understand that truth, to really take it in, and then shop for groceries, get a haircut, do one's work; get on with the business of one's life.
That's the hope, anyway. — David Rakoff

Well into adulthood, writing has never gotten easier. It still only ever begins badly, and there are no guarantees that this is not the day when the jig is finally up. — David Rakoff

I have managed to establish an identity that is based on my internal self, and for that I feel tremendously lucky. — David Rakoff

Lying flat against the tile of the kitchen floor listening to someone else have sex is essentially my early twenties in a nutshell. — David Rakoff

Why not be a communist, she thinks, if it means that kind of belonging? — David Rakoff

The hiking boots the outdoor adventure magazine sent me to buy - large, ungainly potato like things that I have been trying to break in for the past four days - cut into my feet and draw blood as if the were lined with cheese graters. I have come to hate these Timberlands with a fervor I usually reserve for people. Just think, the shoes I wouldn't be caught dead in might actually turn out to be the shoes I am caught dead in. — David Rakoff

A half roll of Life Savers fused to the pockets,
And in yet another, a lone unwrapped mint
Had bundled itself in a stole of gray lint. — David Rakoff

No secrets, no longing, no desperate hoping
Just reach out and grab from a world cracked open. — David Rakoff

It was nice to find out, then, that if one is characterologically incapable of not being a total fuckface, science has not shown you will die any sooner . People might just be gladder when you eventually do. — David Rakoff

Being a stranger was like being dead,
and brought to mind how, in a book he had read
that most folks misunderstood one common state:
The flip side of love is indifference, not hate. — David Rakoff

The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out. — David Rakoff

About the only thing that I have - or had, because it's failing me lately - is my memory. I had a really good memory. I was always terribly protective of that fact. — David Rakoff

You happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless hair trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness
a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of the kitchen chair — David Rakoff

I do not go outdoors ... As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach. — David Rakoff

I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn't like being a child. I didn't like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn't like the lack of autonomy. — David Rakoff

Those weeks before diagnosis can be among the most torturous times. There is a reason you're called a patient once the plastic bracelet goes on. — David Rakoff

There is nothing so cleansing or reassuring as a vicarious sadness. — David Rakoff

Artists are artists whether they produce or not. None of it requires much more than hanging out. — David Rakoff

When people give you a writing assignment, they're asking what you think. That's the very opposite of being an actor. When you're an actor, no one wants to hear what you think. — David Rakoff

Rather than making you never want to eat chicken again, it simply makes you angry. It makes you hold a grudge. You'll eat chicken again, by God, and you'll chew really, really hard. — David Rakoff

Unfortunately, there's no greater rhyme or reason as to why it would be me. And since there is no answer as to why me, it's not a question I feel really entitled to ask. — David Rakoff

When you're making something, you're in a different state. You go into a deep level of concentration, to the point where you're not self-conscious anymore, it's just flowing out of you. — David Rakoff

The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism. — David Rakoff

Writing is like pulling teeth.
From my dick. — David Rakoff

I come by my alarmism honestly. I have learned this custom over the years as I have settled into being a true New Yorker. This is how we welcome foreigners to our shores. Because we are so often frightened by living here, we are annoyed and offended when visitors fail to show the proper signs of terror. So we try to scare the living daylights out of them. — David Rakoff

The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play. — David Rakoff

Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely
structured mistake. — David Rakoff

In my brief glimpse of what is to come I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say, it looks nothing like me. — David Rakoff

It's the false moral component behind blind animal love that so frosts me. The faulty logic that believes that the capacity to adore a nonhuman creature is somehow a purer form of love. — David Rakoff

It must be murder to be an aging beauty, a former Tadzio, to see your future as an ignored spectator rushing up to meet you like the hard pavement. What a small sip of gall to be able to time with each passing year the ever-shorter interval in which someone's eyes focus upon you. And then shift away. — David Rakoff

Not far from my apartment, within a stretch of no more than 500 feet, there are two doggie gyms where Gotham's canines who aren't getting enough exercise running through the city's parks, or are neglecting their all-important doggie glutes and abs, can go for a workout. What can I say? This appalls me. — David Rakoff

Not being funny doesn't make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does. — David Rakoff

I was going to say that writing is about disclosure and acting is about obfuscation, but that's such a little lie. Both of them are about obfuscation and masking oneself. — David Rakoff

I will forever be grateful to my oncologist for opening the door and saying, 'Damn it, the tumor's 10 percent bigger,' before he even said hello. — David Rakoff

We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas. — David Rakoff