Daniel Handler Quotations

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.

'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'.

Any playlist without Prince is no friend of mine.

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.

I think books that are meant to be read in the nighttime ought to confront the very fears that we're trying to think about.

I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.

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.

I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.

You see failed vocabulary in the adult world so often, and it's often because once you reach a certain age you're kind of embarrassed to go look up a word if you don't know what it means.

I kind of always think my work is unfilmable, and when I meet people who are interested in filming it, I'm always stunned.

I write longhand on legal pads, about half at home and half in cafes. I drink a lot of water and eat a lot of raw carrots.

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

I like writing for movies. It's nice to be alone working on fiction in your room, and then it's nice to be in a room with a bunch of people working on a movie.

My first novel took almost six years to sell and was rejected 37 times in the interim, and then finally sold for the smallest amount of money my literary agent had ever negotiated for a work of fiction.

I listen to Morricone, the famed Italian film composer, while I'm working.

I don't know whether it's digital effects or if they trained a baby to bite through steel. I'm not sure what method was used.

I was interested in finding ways to do dark comedy that were actually dark and comic.

For most people, the two primary relationships they have are with their families or romantic ones. And everyone knows those two relationships have a lot to do with one another.

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.

A library is like an island in the middle of a vast sea of ignorance, particularly if the library is very tall and the surrounding area has been flooded.

The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.

They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.

And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.

I’d ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you, and I did.

With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me.

I gasped and pointed the way. I gave you an adventure, Ed, right in front of you but you never saw it until I showed you, and that's why we broke up.

Wishing, like sipping a glass of punch, or pulling aside a bearskin rug in order to access a hidden trapdoor in the floor, is merely a quiet way to spend one's time before the candles are extinguished on one's birthday cake.

The last safe place is safe no more.

I was so grateful that Lemony Snicket wasn't the worst movie ever made that I overlooked many things that might have otherwise upset me.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

I think I’ve always believed that there is one person in the universe who you’re truly meant for–for whom you are truly meant–and the fact that sometimes there are two or even more people on the earth you can fall in love with really bothers me. It suggests that if you work hard you can be meant for anyone.

For Beatrice, when we first met, I was lonely, and you were pretty. Now I am pretty lonely.

I think there are probably just as many adults who would miss the humor of my books, if not more, as there are children.

Right, good temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.

What should we call him?" Klaus asked. "You should call him Dr. Montgomery," Mr. Poe replied, "unless he tells you to call him Montgomery. Both his first and last names are Montgomery, so it doesn't make much difference." "His name is Montgomery Montgomery?" Klaus said, smiling. "Yes, and I'm sure he's very sensitive about that, so don't ridicule him," Mr. Poe said, coughing again into his handkerchief.

I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.

...everyone was right about you- prove them wrong.

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.

The difference between a house and a home is like the difference between a man and a woman-- it might be embarrassing to explain, but it would be very unusual to get them confused.

Either you have the feeling or you don't. Hawk Davies

There are so many movies like this, where you thought you were smarter than the screen but the director was smarter than you, of course he's the one, of course it was a dream, of course she's dead, of course, it's hidden right there, of course it's the truth and you in your seat have failed to notice in the dark.

It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

The moral of Snow White is never eat apples.

So every so often, when I meet someone who's honestly appalled by my books and doesn't understand why they would be attractive to people... I find such people sort of charming, even though they usually don't like me.

You know, there's a big world out there filled with desperate orphans who would gladly swim across an ocean of thumbtacks just to be eclipsed by the long shadow that is cast by my accomplishments.

Anyone who knew Violet well could tell she was thinking hard, because her long hair was tied up in a ribbon to keep it out of her eyes. Violet had a real knack for inventing and building strange devices, so her brain was often filled with images of pulleys, levers, and gears, and she never wanted to be distracted by something as trivial as her hair.

Like a church bell, a coffin, and a vat of melted chocolate, a supply closet is rarely a comfortable place to hide.

I was in a pharmacy and I saw the warnings on the backs of poisonous substances, and I thought, "Well, that's what I can do." So I wrote a list of ingredients in the book, and warnings that they shouldn't consume those ingredients. The editor and the publisher thought that it was a great way to go in terms of reverse psychology, but it honestly hadn't occurred to me that it was reverse psychology. I just thought that it was sort of an honest assessment making clear that if you were timid or easily disturbed, you could turn away.

Is it useful to feel fear, because it prepares you for nasty events, or is it useless, because nasty events will occur whether you are frightened or not?

They're book addicts.

When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them.

I'd finished the first two [books] and they were going to to be published, and [editor] said, "We need you to write a summary that will drive people to these books." And it took forever. I couldn't think of a thing to say. I looked at the back of other children's books that were full of giddy praise and corny rhetorical questions, you know, "Will she have a better time at summer camp than she thinks?" "How will she escape from the troll's dungeon?" All these terrible, terrible summaries of books, and I just couldn't.

Beef. Yes. Roast beef. It's the Swedish term for beef that is roasted.

The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies.

As I am sure you know, when people say 'It's my pleasure,' they usually mean something along the lines of, 'There's nothing on Earth I would rather do less.' [...]

The way that the stories go in the Snicket books is just the way stories naturally go to me. They're full of misery, and yet the misery ends up being slightly hilarious. And in terms of the warnings on the back of the books, that really started as an honest assessment of their marketability.

But there was more, as there always is when the love goes. She was haunted, naturally. Otherwise what is the point, why leave your rickety house, and why this yo-yo world giving us things and yanking them back?

If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.

I'd written my first novel for adults, which was called Basic Eight and was set in a high school, and we were having a devil of a time selling it. It ended up in the hands of an editor of a children's publishing house, for which it was entirely inappropriate. She said, "Well, we can't publish this, but I think you should write something for children," which I thought was a really terrible idea.

Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else.

A bolt from the blue.

I will love you as the iceberg loves the ship, and the passengers love the lifeboat and the lifeboat loves the teeth of the sperm whale, and the sperm whale loves the flavor of naval uniforms.

A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.

Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like.

It is a lonely feeling when someone you care about becomes a stranger.

Taking one’s chances is like taking a bath, because sometimes you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.

Everyone tells you it's all right to cry, but not enough people say it's all right if you don't want people to know.

I think if I were walking someplace and I saw a corpse my brain would tell me it was a million things before I believed it was a corpse.

Making you happy isn't making me happy

Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again.

How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too.

I find reading screenplays difficult, as they're only a roadmap for what a movie might end up being.

This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go.

The rinsed foam swirled into one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything.

No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don't read is often as important as what you do read.

I have produced things that I would say were sincerely cheerful. But then I am reminded by other people that no one else would see them that way.

People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

But there are times in this harum-scarum world when figuring out the right thing to do is quite simple, but doing the right thing is simply impossible....

Well-read people are less likely to be evil.

When it was first optioned, I was told that the chances of The Basic Eight becoming a film were slim because no one was making teen movies, and then later, I was told that the chances were slim because there were so many teen movies, and then I was later told that the chances were slim because teen films were over. I'm not sure when the magic window of opportunity was, but perhaps it's still on the horizon.

Wicked people never have time for reading. It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.

It is useless for me to describe to you how terrible Violet, Klaus, and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.

There are two kinds of fears: rational and irrational- or in simpler terms, fears that make sense and fears that don't.

When I wrote Rick, I had the idea that I would take the plot of nearly every opera and turn it into a dark film, which is something I still may do.

Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you're kidding.

There is only laughing across the land as the car moves you along, on your way someplace with love in the car.

The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights.

I waited just to see you at that kind of peace, I wanted to be beside you, I wanted you to wake up slowly or startle, or just half awaken and turn over or murmur my name. I wanted to watch you forever, or sleep beside you forever, or sleep forever while you woke and watched me, something forever anyway. I wanted to kiss you, rumple your hair, rest three fingertips on your hip bone warm and smooth, wake you that way or hush you back to sleep.

Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean.

We are a nation of children letting horrible things happen, and flunking Calc.

This is love, and the trouble with it: it can make you embarrassed. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up. Everybody's chewed over this. This unites us, this part of love.

Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we're rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we're so ready for our rebellious phase we can't help but feel it's safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it.

The idea that the curtain rises on what is often more or less a happy scene, and it will fall just a few hours later, and everyone will be dead or have gone mad... I find that kind of narrative very appealing.

This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys.

I started making plans, thinking we would get that far.

I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.

Opera was an enormous part of my childhood. My parents were both opera buffs, and they met in the box seat of an opera performance. And I also was a boy soprano, so before puberty hit, I was onstage playing a wide variety of orphans and urchins in all sorts of operas, and the sheer melodrama of their stories was just always appealing to me.