Top 30 David Rakoff Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I value kindness in myself and others. I try to remain super-vigilant about my targets and make extra sure that my sometimes barbed comments are deserved and in response to genuine malefaction.

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.

Altruism is innate, but it’s not instinctual. Everybody’s wired for it, but a switch has to be flipped.

At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it’s pretty nifty: I don’t mine coal; I get paid to write.

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. I appreciate honesty.

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.

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

I’m anti-religious. I don’t like people telling me what to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one’s best, then at very least one’s most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 and 53 years old.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I have no problem with animals, I just like people more.

‘Play It Again Sam’s opening shot is the same as ‘Purple Rose’s final one: a close-up of a face, rapt in a movie house. I’ve certainly felt that in my life. I’ve been known to cry watching Gene Kelly.

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.