Last week’s books lead, Steven Blum’s interview with David Sedaris, was a lot of fun to read. But people have asked: If Blum talked with Sedaris for an hour and a half, where the hell is the rest of the interview?

The answer: The whole goddamned thing is after the jump. It’s a long interview, but it’s totally worth your lunchtime attention. Topics discussed include why Matt Damon is like an iPod, whether Stephanie is a good name for a donkey, and the fact that not everyone thinks that Abraham Lincoln calling friendship a cancer is funny.

What do you learn about your stories when you read them to strangers?

I can tell if people are listening are not. It’s funny how that works, you know, and maybe it’s a creaking of chairs. It’s not just the sounds people make when they’re bored or tired, you can actually tell when people are listening and not listening. I read a story the other day and I knew it wasn’t terribly funny so I wasn’t expecting big laughs but I was happy that people were listening either way. And then sometimes you can hear. When you read something on a stage you can tell, oh I’ve already said that or that’s unnecessary or oh that’s true but it doesn’t sound true or oh that’s not true but it still doesn’t sound true. Just certain things, when I hear myself read it out loud I can understand it much more clearly.

What’s the question you’ve been waiting for an interviewer to ask?

How much money I have. I always want to be asked that. And especially when I go to colleges, and especially in America you know you’re allowed to ask how much money I make and I’m surprised that no one’s asked me. That said, I wouldn’t answer if you did.

So, how much money do you have, Mr. Sedaris?

Oh, more than I used to, that’s what I’d say. Or, “oh around what some people make.” But I’m curious about things like that. Like how much money does an astronaut make? Do you have any idea how much money someone makes for going into space? I don’t have a clue. I’d love to know though.

What was your favorite book tour audience?

Baton Rouge, Louisiana, because it was just one surprise after another. You know, a woman comes up and you say ‘What did you get for mother’s day?’ ‘Oh, two donkeys.’ Two donkeys! And then she says, “I’m wondering if you’d name them for me.” And I don’t remember what I named the first one but I named the second one Stephanie. Not to blow my own horn but that’s such a good name for a donkey. Stephanie! (Bawdy laughter, then giggling). Or maybe she said mule. Is there a difference between a donkey and a mule? I think she said mule. But I love that you would then talk about it like, “Stephanie, she’s just so stubborn, I mean she’s nice but she’s just so stubborn. It’s one thing to be head-strong but that Stephanie is just stubborn.” And there was just a lot of that in Baton Rouge. I was just surprised a lot. So in Baton Rouge I did a reading and then I was sitting on my ass for nine hours. I’ve never, in my life signed books for that long. But the people—they would wait for me. They would work for eight hours and then for this book night, they’d put in ten. So I read for an hour and then I signed for nine hours. You know it’s my own fault because I run my mouth but they were just really interesting people I thought. It’s a good kind of a place to do a reading. Like Tulsa. Because, you know, they would love to attend a book tour but no one ever comes. It makes more sense to go there than, you know, to go to a lot of other cities where people have a reading every day of the week. I had a wonderful time there.

What books do you read?

Right now I’m reading a gudebook on Rio because I’m going to Brasil for my South American book tour and I have two days off in Rio. Before that I read Our Story Ends by Tobias Wolff. And before that I read Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates and before that I read No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July and before that I read a book called The Bible Salesman by Clyde Edgerton. I don’t know how I didn’t read How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen but that’s what I’m reading next. I love that guy. Kinda hard to read sometimes when I’m working on things. When I have a lot of deadlines because, you know, I’m so influenced by what I read. But now I love books on tape. Do you ever listen to books on tape? I love iPods. You know, I’m a technophobe so I don’t know how to download music but I love to take a CD and put it in my computer and then put it in my iPod. Absolutely. I don’t think anyone but me understands how handsome Matt Damon is. Right? I mean some other people might think he’s cute but they don’t understand the way Matt Damon looks the way that I do. Just like no one can appreciate an iPod as much as I do. I’m convinced of that. Isn’t it interesting how that works? That without meaning to a person or a product can speak to you in that way. Like, why do I think no one understands how good looking Matt Damon is than me? Why do I think that? I’ve never met Matt Damon. But I’m convinced of that.

I went on Matt Damon’s website, I Met Matt, and it was people saying “Oh my God I met Matt Damon and he shook my hand” and “ Oh my God I met Matt Damon and he is so cute” and I look at that and I think “You don’t know what cute is. You don’t know. If that’s the only word you can come up with for Matt Damon, that’s pathetic. Like, you don’t understand the essence of Matt Damon. That word doesn’t even begin to describe him. I mean if I have a vice it’s certainly not Matt Damon so why does he speak to me so clearly? Like Hugh’s father. He was talking about Matt Damon in a movie and he said, “oh he’s just you know a pretty boy and they needed a body for that role” and I said, “Matt Damon is what? He’s just a what?” And I think he’s a good actor. And I don’t want to hear anything bad about Matt Damon’s friends either. I thought Gone Baby Gone was a good movie.

Today I went to the Apple store and I saw those touch iPods but I think that’s too complicated for me.

Do you have any stalkers?

No. There was a woman last week and you know if someone calls themselves a stalker they’re not a real stalker. But there was this woman who drove, she came to two or three cities, and I guess she’d leave right after the reading and get in her car and drive to the next one. She was at my hotel in Denver and I had no idea how she got the address for it But again: if someone calls themselves a stalker then they’re probably not a stalker. They’re probably just a nice person.

When are you going to write fiction?

Well, in Barrel Fever there’s a lot of fiction. And I’m writing a book on animals and there are a lot of fables. But I was wondering if I could get that date moved. With animals, it can be harder to write about them, especially when they’re talking. With humans you can refer to them by their name, or their occupation, or you can just say “she.” But with animals, you have to write, like, “the seal and the chipmunk went to lunch” and every time you have to call them “the seal and the chipmunk. ”It gets very repetitive. If I was talking about you I could say, Steve the college student, the journalist, the Washington state resident. Your name is Steve right?

Steven. None of this Steve nonsense. Would you ever like someone to call you Dave?

Daves are different from Davids. David Letterman doesn’t care if people call him Dave or David but he’s the only one that I know of like that. I don’t like to write either when I sign books, though. Recently, instead of signing my name, I’ve been drawing little things in people’s books. You know, just little mementos. Like, I’ve been drawing these old-timey signs and on them I write “Abortions: three dollars.” And I just think I’m hilarious. Sometimes I’ll draw a little knot in the sign to make it look even more quaint. I don’t know why that makes me so happy. This woman, she introduced herself by saying she was very liberal, but she just didn’t want the abortion sign in the front jacket of her new book. So, I asked her, ‘what if I changed it to thirteen dollars [for an abortion]?’ Again, I have no idea why that makes me so happy. I used to draw Abe Lincoln with a bubble coming out of his mouth that says “friendship is a cancer” or an owl saying “I like black people.” This is what happens when you’ve been signing books for nine hours.

How do you feel about blogs?

The whole concept is very new to me. I was in St. Louis and my publicist said there were a lot of bloggers at my reading and that they were blogging about meeting me, and I guess I’m just not used to it. So it’s like a diary? But I thought the whole point of a diary was that it was private. Like, I’m going to write about this interview in my diary, but no one is going to see it except for me. Wouldn’t you want to revise something before putting it on a blog? I don’t show my first draft to my editor at the New Yorker. He’d likely decline the story. I usually give him my seventh draft. Then we work through three more drafts before I’m happy with it. But then again, what do I know? I’m old.

Do you have an audience in mind when you write?

No. I meet people on my tour but I have no idea how to pander to them. Like, I think writing “Abortions: three dollars” in people’s books is funny, but not everybody likes that. I heard this story recently about a grandmother who fell off her lawnmower and it chopped off pieces of her butt, and her arms and legs, and I just thought that the visual was hilarious. But, not every crowd would go for that. So, it’s hard to have an audience in mind when you have no idea what will go well and what won’t go well.

What does your first draft look like?

Well it’s like fifteen pages and it has all these tumors attached to it. There are things you write that make more sense aloud than on page. There are times you wake up and you think, “I had a bad review in the New York Times book section today” but then you remind yourself that you were recently published in the New Yorker and if there’s something you don’t like in the New Yorker that’s a problem with you, not the New Yorker. They don’t do favors for writers.

Do you ever write when you’re stoned?

I quit smoking pot nine years ago. I haven’t waked and baked since college. It used to be that if I was sick, I’d get high, if someone needed to take my picture, I’d get high. But I think I was hypercritical of my writing when I was high. I mean, I’d love to get high and just stare at the cover of my book and feel it against my fingers, I think that’d be really great since I really like the cover drawing, and I’d probably just sit there stroking it saying “oh my God, oh my God.” Or it would be fun to get high and walk by a bookstore and see it sitting on a shelf and think, “That’s my book!” But if I say I’ll get high just this once, well, it’s better to just quit and stay quit.

Do you want children?

I want grandchildren. I don’t want children. I have a friend who just adopted a three-year-old and I get tired just watching the child. And I’m 51, so I’d be dead by the time my child was ten. I’m going to die at age 62. I’m going to die in 10 years. I used to think if I had a child he’d be in third grade but if I had a child he’d be like 28.

Anything interesting happen on the plane ride here?

The woman behind me turned and said she tried to come to my reading and asked if I could sign her book. But, the other day, when I was in Tulsa, they made an announcement that soldiers were on the plane who had been in Iraq fighting the war against terror, and that we should pray for their safe journey home. You don’t ever want to hear the word pray from a flight attendant. I’m dying to think of some other plane story to tell you. Oh, here’s a good one: I met a flight attendant and she taught me a new word. She said, “Us flight attendants- we get so gassy on the airplane we end up farting as we’re going up and down the aisles of the plane. We call that ‘crop dusting.’” She also said a flight attendant way of saying go fuck yourself is “I’ll be right back.” And then this male flight attendant told me, when he was angry with the way people on the plane were treating him, he’d go up and down the aisles saying, “You’re trash, you’re trash, you’re trash.” You can learn a lot from flight attendants.

How do you feel about people calling you a comedian?

When you have a piece of paper in your hand, it’s a completely different thing. I write comic essays but I’m not a comedian. I actually look forward to the Q and A because I don’t have to be reading. It feels good to read but I wouldn’t last two minutes in a comedy club. I’d be booed off stage. So, I’m not a comedian. But sometimes it’s hard to explain that you care about the writing part; there’s a rhythm to the sentences. You don’t get the respect that a regular writer would.

What have you done in Seattle?

I went right from the airport to a radio interview then to another radio interview then to Amazon.com, so I haven’t gotten to do much in the city yet. But I have a friend I met here. I met her when I came here on my book tour and she laughed during my reading, and she just had this incredibly distinctive laugh. At the end of the reading, I asked for “the woman with the laugh” to stay afterwards, and we met and talked. And usually I’ll see her when I visit Seattle and we’ll go out for dinner. She’s very nice. You have a little more time on a lecture tour and I don’t seem to have two minutes on this tour. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a day off in Seattle. I went to the Flying Fish restaurant and I liked that. Normally you don’t get to eat. I’ve been eating things in front of people, like while I’m signing they’re book, and sometimes, if I’m eating a burger, I’ll get stains all over someone’s book jacket. I had a wrap the other day while signing books, which is smarter because it’s less messy.

How does Hugh feel about the way he’s represented in your book?

I’ll say to Hugh, “you’re in this story” and he won’t want to read it until it’s in the New Yorker. He’s a very practical person and when he does something out of character I don’t want to write about it and he knows I wouldn’t take something out of context. He’s a straight man, very logical and practical, because you don’t want two people like me in a relationship. He actually wants to figure out subway maps and look up street addresses. If I said I was going to go out now and plant a vegetable garden, he would fight me over it.

Does it ever take time for the humor of a situation to reveal itself?

Yeah, yeah but that’s the good thing about writing, you think, “Ok I can turn this around someday. Maybe not today.” There’s a story in the book in which I wound up in a waiting room, in France, in my underpants. And everybody else had their clothes on. It was like a bad dream. I’m not comfortable that way. Like, I don’t walk around the house barefoot, I mean I take my clothes off to go into the bathtub and then I put them back on. So it was not ok for me to be in my underpants, but I thought, “one day, I bet I can write about this.”

How long did you take to write about it?

Uh….six years. I tried to write about it before. But sometimes you need a certain distance from a story before you can write about it. I wrote about it in a different context, I wrote a piece about health care in france and I included it, but because it was more like an essay, but with the underpants thing, like this long story, attached to it, it didn’t really make sense.

What would have to happen to you in Seattle for you to write a short story about your time here?

Oh, any number of things. I mean, I had some laundry sent out and they’re going to return it so I could be up in my room and I could be getting out of the bathtub and someone could be coming in with my laundry and that would be pretty bad so I could write about that. Let’s see…there could be a fire at the hotel. Somebody could punch me at the reading tonight, or throw something at me, or vomit on me. I’m still holding out hope. But, you know, it doesn’t have to be a big thing. You know, every day I get up and I write in my diary and I think, what was the biggest thing that happened to me yesterday. Ok, what was yesterday’s lead story? What was yesterday all about? I remember a day last week when I signed books for like nine hours and then something good happened that day like I found out my book was selling well, but what that day was to me was there was a guy with Downs Syndrome on the plane and he was either with his dad or grand dad who was seated across the aisle from me and he was so profoundly retarded that it didn’t matter to him that the shade was up or down. You know what I mean? He wasn’t like ‘Oh I can’t believe we’re on a plane!” He was like this: (Hangs his jaw and slumps his shoulders). And he had his hands like covering, he had like really big hands and he had a mustache and it broke my heart, it just broke my heart and the man he was with who was either his dad or his grand dad, they didn’t say a word to each other, and they were across the aisle from me on the plane. And I saw him at the baggage claim holding another man’s hand and I thought well maybe that’s his dad, and the other man’s his grand dad, but he didn’t look like he wasn’t thinking “Oh, baggage claim.” Like it was like a cow was at the baggage claim. Like he didn’t think like oh that suitcase has gone around three times because he wouldn’t even know what the baggage claim is, and I could not…that was what that day was to me. And you know nothing happened, so it doesn’t have to be anything big.

What kind of advice would you give to all the literary kids?

I’d just say, you know, to write every day and to leave the other part to somebody else. I’ve been surprised by the number of people who have given me their writing on this trip. You know, and they want me to respond to them and I would never do that. I wouldn’t do it when I was twenty, I wouldn’t do it when I was thirty, and I wouldn’t do it now. I was always told that you just work as hard as you can every day and when the timing is right someone will ask you, ‘Can I read what you’ve written?’ and that’s what happened to me and if it can happen to me it can happen to anybody.