Augusten Burroughs People Quotations

When you say, "I need more confidence," what you're really saying is, "I need those people over there to approve of me." That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.

To me, these people were as exotic as animals in a zoo. I'd never seen anything like them. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be one of them or simply live among them taking notes and photographs.

Most of us have love in our lives. Most of us love other people are are ourselves loved by others. But make no mistake: you are alone in the world. You were born alone, even if you were born conjoined. And you die alone, unable to bring a single person with you.

I think people might think, oh, I don't want to approach the big famous author because it's embarrassing, but then they think for two seconds about it and realize, this is, like, a toilet bowl reader.

Like cubic zirconia, I only look real. I'm an imposter. The fact is, I am not like other people.

Marriage is overdone. As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting.

I like, though, that people have a hunger to connect with other people. They're desperate to know that you're not lying to them or misleading them.

Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.

The dark side of blogging is, of course, people can be (and are) just savage and uncivilized, deeply cruel and fully unaccountable.

When people meet me, many times they're very surprised because they expect someone who is kind of wacky with seven piercings and very hip and cool and New York City, and I'm not.

...handsome people are always interesting to watch. But a handsome person in crisis is riveting.

I suppose home is, for me, more of a state of mind. It's really more of about being where I want to be with people I care about.

The only other people who have had experiences similar to those of this man were locked up inside institutions for the criminally insane. The difference is, this guy gets business cards.

A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they're not. Well, yeah; that's true. That's one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that's a damn good thing.

In order for us [people] to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn't fair and it's not polite and we can't grow it. It happens. Genius happens and it doesn't always happen in a zip code where we can access it. Therefore, we kind of need [Internet] not to keep tabs on everybody but we need to give them access to everybody else.

In general, advertising isn't a "creative" atmosphere. It's a business atmosphere and your job is puzzle solving. My favorite aspect of the business, I guess, was presenting to clients. What I enjoyed least were the clients. Worried corporate brand managers, trying to dumb-down their ads for the stupid American population. I hated the disrespect that these people had for "consumers."

Maybe you feel pressure to be positive because so many people rely on your good, fake-positive energy? If that's the case, screw everybody else. You're not a bottle of Valium.

I think part of the reason I'm attracted to Foster is because he's such a mess. I mean, the people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I'm not used to normal. I'm used to disaster. I don't know, as messed up as he is, he's also sort of exciting, sort of a challenge. I'm accustomed to working for love.

Just as I had long suspected, a person didn't really need math for anything anyway. Maybe some people did. Some limited people.

People generally like happy endings, which is something I learned from my years in advertising. I like happy endings myself, but only if they're honest. I'm just as happy with a terrible, hopeless ending.

I think I love him, but I also think that you can love people who aren't good for you.

There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stunned by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say, "Hi." They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.

You must never allow something that happened to you to become a morbidly treasured heirloom that you carry, show people, put back in its black velvet pouch and then tuck back into your jacket where you can keep it close to your heart.

Stars should not be seen alone. That's why there are so many. Two people should stand together and look at them. One person alone will surely miss the good ones.

Are you one of those people who says on a first date, 'I'm really not in a hurry to meet somebody, I figure if it happens, it happens'? Because those are the most desperate people of all. I'm just saying this so that if you are this person, you aren't hiding it from anybody. There is no shame in being hungry for another person. There is no shame in wanting very much to share your life with somebody.