David Sedaris talks in stories. It's not surprising, really. The author of six best-selling books of biographical essays, including "Naked," "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and his latest work, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," is clearly a master storyteller. On paper, at least. Thing is, he's good in person too.

Funny. So very funny. And clever. And perfectly acerbic.

If "chatty" weren't such a diminutively cute word, you could say he was chatty. Only he's not. He's a storyteller. Like the narrator of one of those old children's books about life lessons and values who uses parables to make a point.

On the phone from Paris one morning last month, it was story hour with Sedaris. A list of 10 or so questions that could have been answered in 15 minutes — the amount of time Sedaris' agent said was alotted for the interview — became 100 minutes of really good words. Some of those words appear here.

The following Q&A is a pared-down version of my conversation with Sedaris. The interview didn't go down in quite this orderly of a fashion. There was background: Sedaris, who was raised in North Carolina, lives most of the year in London with his boyfriend Hugh, and spends a lot of time in France, where the two of them lived before moving to England.

There were tangents. Fits of laughter — first me, then him, then me again (I'm a sucker for a funny person who can't help but laugh at his own funniness). There was banter: I told him to keep watching "Lost;" it gets better. He told me to watch "The Specials" on BBC. I said I would.

So much more was said than can fit on these pages. But these are the answers to the questions. While reading his words, know this: Almost every answer was punctuated by laughter. Sometimes it was outright laughter. Other times it was quiet, facetious laughter. And other times it was irrepressible laughter — the kind that wells up and gurgles in your chest when you're not quite ready to let it out.

Sedaris will be reading from "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" at 8 tonight at the Blaisdell Concert Hall.

You do these book tours where you stand in front of an audience and read from your books, which of course has the audience in stitches. Had you ever considered doing standup comedy?

No. I've never liked that energy — "How's everybody doing tonight?!" — that way of confronting the audience. It makes me very uncomfortable. Sometimes I watch it on television, and I feel safe watching it on television, but I wouldn't feel safe being in that room. Plus, when you do standup comedy, you get heckled — you're under pressure to be funny. I'm really not under pressure to be funny. I have my moments, but I feel like I can move on and become melancholy, and the audience is still there with me. I've never been heckled because that paper I'm reading from protects me. And I wear a tie.

When you're touring, do you always read the same pieces of work or do you read different pieces, depending on your audience?

I read out loud for about an hour, and then I answer questions for about 15 minutes. Between the reading and the questions, I do some shtick, and that's the closest I ever come to comedy.

When I begin the tour, I don't really have anything to talk about. And then something happens and I talk about it. After a couple of days, I can hone it, and then I add to it, and by the end of the tour, I have my shtick. But it's all based on stuff that happens on the tour.

On my last tour in June, I had written this silly little thing about breast milk — about drinking your own breast milk. After the show, I was signing books, and this woman came up to me and said she had once put her own breast milk in some coffee. I must have had that look on my face because she said, "Look. I was home with a houseful of kids, I couldn't get out. It happened."

A couple of nights later I met a woman who went to a yard sale in Indiana and was thinking about buying some champagne glasses. She told the woman selling the glasses that she would buy them if she had something to go in them. The woman responded by saying: "Well, I'm nursing." And then she filled a champagne glass with warm breast milk.

I asked the woman, "What did you do?" She said, "I drank it. I didn't know how not to."

I thought about that for days. So I added it to my repertoire.

Then a woman came up to me in Fargo (N.D.) and asked me to sign a little jar of breast milk. She had gone home to pump it after she had heard me tell the other breast milk stories.

I asked her, "Could I just see what it smells like?" She looked at me and said: "We both know where this is going."

So, of course, I drank some of her breast milk.

And that was my shtick. I had a theme for the tour, and the theme helps me to get my shtick. It's not anything I would write about. It becomes an oral thing, and I think if I tried to write about it, it would just seem forced.

I got bored of the breast milk thing by the end of the tour, and I've already started testing a theme for the next tour. I think I want the theme to be rudeness. I love — LOVE — rudeness stories, so I'm going to try and collect them on this tour.

One time I collected monkey stories. Every monkey story is a tragedy. The saddest one was about this woman whose family had a monkey and a donkey. The donkey's name was Jackpot. Jackpot died when a power line fell on him.

What's the art of delivering humorous prose? Just because someone is funny in writing, doesn't mean they're funny in person, but you are.

I recall in high school, in English class, we'd sometimes be required to read out loud, and I just remember sitting there thinking: Call on me. I know I can read this next paragraph better than anybody. Please call on me! And then: Dammit! You picked him to read that? We have to listen to HIM read that?

I don't know what makes a person a good reader. I do know that you can't try too hard. You can't lay it on too thick. That's the thing about humor. It doesn't work when you try too hard to be funny.

Well, you're doing something right because your books are a riot. But to be really honest, I can't help but feel a little twinge of discomfort while reading them because I can't help wondering if the people who appear in your writing — your family, boyfriend, neighbors, friends — are totally ticked off that I, and millions of other people, are laughing at them. Do you worry about that too?

Whenever I write about my family, I always give it to them first and ask if there's anything they'd like me to change or get rid of. Hugh (my boyfriend) doesn't want to know. He'll wait and read it in The New Yorker. But he also knows that I won't tell the world what he looks like naked.

I had an ex-boyfriend who told me I was not allowed to write about him. I had a story recently in The New Yorker, and in order to tell the story, I had to explain that he and I had broken up, and he was upset about it. In that situation, there's nothing I can do about it. I didn't name him, I didn't say why we broke up, and I needed it in the story in order for the story to work. I guess I felt like it was my life, too. You can't make that out of bounds for me.

For all your hilarity, you also visit some of the very dark corners of life — especially in your more recent work. Did you ever consider skipping the humor and just being a downer?

I just finished a book by Tim Johnston called "Irish Girl" and boy, that's a dark book. I don't know where the guy learned all that stuff, but boy, it was dark in there. And I didn't laugh once while reading that book — and he didn't want me to. I couldn't do what he does as well as he does it, so I'll leave that to him. For myself, I like the mix of the two. I used to be more inclined just to want the laughs, but I think that changed when I became confident enough to know that I could get the laugh. Then I started thinking: What would happen if I went without it? If I wasn't glib? What if I said what I really thought or what I really feel or what I'm really worried about? That's when the stories started changing. I knew I could get the laugh, and now I could live without it. I don't know that people like it more. I think they were probably happier with the old way, but it feels more satisfying to switch back and forth.

You're very good at making the mundane funny. Do you seek out experiences that you know will make a good story or do you just see humor in everything?

I find that when I seek it out, it never seems to work. Magazines will offer to send me to Pamplona to run with the bulls, or to some festival where people throw tomatoes at each other because they think I'm the perfect person to write about it. But then you feel under pressure to find what's funny about it. It just works better when it happens on its own. The problem is I don't do much, so I'm always hoping a maniac will knock on my door. I'm always hoping they'll come to me. To go out searching for it doesn't work.

When I went to a nudist colony for my book "Naked," I had to make it sound like one thing led to another, and then the next thing I knew, I was just there. That was one situation where I went to write about it, and I felt like it failed because of that. I was there on a false premise, in a way. It wasn't something I just wandered into. I prefer a more organic process.

If you met David Sedaris at a dinner party, how would you describe him?

I think I would think him inquisitive. That's a polite term.

In America, nobody thinks anything of it if you ask a lot of questions: What do you do? What does your mother do? Where are you from? It's a shortcut. It's saying: "What class are you in?" Everyone knows that. America is one of those countries where the poorer you were when you were growing up, the more pride you're going to take in it. The richer you were growing up, the more shame you're going to exhibit, and the more you're going to try to play it down.

In France and England, it's different. You can't ask questions like that. You're just not allowed to. If you're a foreigner, you can sometimes get away with it, but you can't keep getting away with it, so I have a really hard time here. I want to ask questions, but the questions I want to ask just don't work here. I feel like I never got my footing.

That's true even more so in England. It's my inclination to ask questions, and I'm always surprised by people who don't. I'm surprised by people who don't exhibit curiosity, but I think I can tend to scare people with mine. I think there's a point — like when I pull out my notebook — when they think I've gone too far.

Do you always carry a notebook with you?

Yes. Sometimes I can wait until I get outside to start writing stuff down, but sometimes I'll just pull out my notebook and start writing. If I leave the house and realize I've forgotten my notebook, I'll go home and get it.

Do you draw most of your stories from the notes in your notebook?

I write things down in my notebook during the day and the next morning I'll write them down in my diary. And there are good days — action–packed days — and there are slow news days. But like I said, nothing big generally happens to me.

I was in Normandy in a village near our home, and in the village, there's a cross with Jesus hanging off of it, and I just wondered why he's always thin. I've never seen a fat Jesus. Have you ever seen one? Like with hair all over his body? And hair on his back and stuff?

No. I've never seen such a Jesus, though I'm sure he was hairier in real life, right?

I would think so. And how hard is it to worship a good-looking guy, which is basically what he is in most pictures? But what if he wasn't? What if he looked like Ron Jeremy?

Oh no! You didn't just say that! I'll never be the same.

Yeah, so that was a slow news day. I was just musing on something in the absence of any real news.

Sometimes I purposely try to slow it down — I'll write a whole page on a person I saw on the train or an interaction I had with somebody.

Do you write in your diary every day?

Yes. I might miss about two days a year. I find that it's good to just write for the sake of writing — to remember the joy of it. It's not a hardship at all. I've been doing it for so long that I wouldn't know what else to do.

I recently started watching "Lost" on DVD and I keep thinking, what would I do if I ran out of pencils and paper on the island?

And did you come up with an answer?

I guess I would be forced to engage. Sometimes I feel like I should be out there, doing other stuff, instead of in my room writing about yesterday, but I can't stop.

I'm going to go out there, but I can't leave until I've put yesterday on paper. Then I can start with making today happen.