Quotes from Daniel Handler

Take back the smile and the night, take it all back, I wish I could.

Sooner or later, everyone's story has an unfortunate event or two...The solution, of course, is to stay as far away from the world as possible and lead a safe, simple life.

I was not a particularly brave child, I think, because I had a narrative mind, because my mind automatically went to any terrible thing that could happen.

In times of extreme stress, one can often find energy hidden in even the most exhausted areas of the body.

Waiting is one of life's hardships.

For Beatrice, when we met, my life began. Soon afterwards, yours ended.

It is terribly rude to tell people that their troubles are boring.

'The Long Goodbye' is one book I like to read over and over again, and it was an enormous inspiration for 'All The Wrong Questions'.

Accidents happen all the time.

There are some who go through life with a shadow hanging over them, particularly if they live in a building which has long wide awnings.

The thing you hope will never happen to you might just happen to someone else instead, who has been spending their life dreading the thing that will happen to you.

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.

Reading is one form of escape. Running for your life is another.

...in life it is often the tiny details that end up being the most important.

It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book's first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

Grammar is the greatest joy in life, don't you find?

Life never end when you are in it.

Knowing that something is wrong and doing it anyway happens very often in life, and I doubt I will ever know why.

There are many things in life that become different if you take a long look at them.

I didn't like books where people played on a sports team and won a bunch of games, or went to summer camp and had a wonderful time. I really liked a book where a witch might cut a child's head off or a pack of angry dogs might burst through a door and terrorize a family.

Shyness is a curious thing, because, like quicksand, it can strike people at any time, and also, like quicksand, it usually makes its victims look down.

Tears are curious things, for like earthquakes or puppet shows, they can occur at any time, without any warning and without any good reason.

When you start writing a picture book, you have to write a manuscript that has enough language to prompt the illustrator to get his or her gears running, but then you end up having to cut it out because you don't want any of the language to be redundant to the pictures that are being drawn.