David Rakoff Quotes

18 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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 not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. 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
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
Central to living a life that is good, is a life that's forgiving.

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

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

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
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
Simplicity, it seems, has always been wasted on those who simply cannot appreciate it

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

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
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
It would be peevish and ungracious after being taken to such a lovely supper in this Temple of Food, I know, but I am desperate to ask the question that begs to be posed: Just how fucking good can olive oil get?

David Rakoff