"There’s a growing concern in publishing about cultural sensitivities. Do you make a point of ignoring them?"

The Guardian interviewer asks David Sedaris. He answers:

A lot of times people will say after a reading: “I can’t believe what you said”, and I’m literally thinking: “What did I say?” I feel like so many of those issues are really just the enemies of comedy. After every show it’s something. There’s an essay where a woman shits in her pants on the aeroplane and I said it looked like she’d taken her skirt off a long-dead Gypsy, because I want people to see the colour of the skirt. I read that in Edinburgh and this young man comes up and says: “I have a bone to pick with you. I’m one-tenth Gypsy. I really don’t appreciate you using that word.” I’m like: “Call me when you’re nine-tenths Gypsy.” I mean, who isn’t one-tenth Gypsy? Writing isn’t propaganda.

Also, why David Sedaris hates "Moby-Dick":

About 15 years ago, Esquire asked me to pick a classic I’d never read, and I started it and thought there is no way I’m going to finish this book, so I told myself I could not take a bath or wash my hair until I finished the book. I hated that book.

How to hate a book. And so much water in that one:

But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.

That sentence is from "Moby-Dick" (obviously). Here's the new David Sedaris book, "Calypso" (which I've read a few times).

The dress culottes weren’t as expensive as the pants that come up to my nipples, but still they were extravagant. I buy a lot of what I think of as “at-home clothes,” things I’d wear at my desk or when lying around at night after a bath, but never outdoors. These troubling, Jiminy Cricket–style trousers, for instance, that I bought at another of my favorite Japanese stores, 45rpm. They have horizontal stripes and make my ass look like a half dozen coins collected in a sack made from an old prison uniform.

That's David Sedaris. See how different from Melville? And yet both authors have a bath.

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandistein said:

Those two sucky types, married for mildness:

But even so, amid the tornadoed dress culottes, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in “at-home clothes”; and while extravagant stripes of unwaning fashion revolve round my nipples, deep down and deep inland there I still shoppe me in eternal mildness of Japanese stores.