Daniel Handler Quotes

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

There's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.

Wherever it's good, whatever strange, faraway land, let's go there, let's stay in that place alone.

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

The clock in his car hadn't adjusted to daylight saving time yet and said it was four-fifteen when it was really five-fifteen. Peter probably didn't have time to fiddle with it, or it was tricky, as car clocks are. I didn't mind. You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans, or at least other people who can't work clocks. You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love. If you are going to take a lifelong journey with somebody, you can't mind if the other person believes they are leaving for that journey an hour earlier than you, as long as truly, in the real world, you are both leaving at exactly the same time.

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.

Call me later, you'd said, so I could call you later, at night, and it is those nights I miss you, Ed, the most, on the phone, you beautiful bastard.

One wanders through life as if wandering through a field in the dark of night, wearing a blindfold and very heavy shoes, with a poisonous toad waiting patiently beneath a clump of weeds, knowing full well that eventually you will step on him.

This is love if it's not with you, a terrible fiery something that makes people look away, and it feels like a punch in the throat.

For Beatrice, I cherished, you perished, The world's been nightmarished.

The window rattles without you, you bastard. The trees are the cause, rattling in the wind, you jerk, the wind scraping those leaves and twigs against my window. They'll keep doing this, you terrible husband, and slowly wear away our entire apartment building. I know all these facts about you and there is no longer any use for them. What will I do with your license plate number, and where you hid the key outside so we'd never get locked out of this shaky building? What good does it do me, your pants size and the blue cheese preference for dressing? Who opens the door in the morning now, and takes the newspaper out of the plastic bag when it rains? I'll never get back all the hours I was nice to your parents. I nudge my cherry tomatoes to the side of the plate, bastard, but no one is waiting there with a fork to eat them. I miss you and I love you, bastard bastard bastard, come and clean the onion skins out of the crisper and trim back the tree so I can sleep at night.

I like to think that I get better and better as a writer, but it seems pretty easy to me to slip on disguises of various people.

Take it back, Ed. Take it all back.

The file clanked against me, my stupid idea nobody would have gotten had I ever done it. You even wouldn't have gotten it, Ed, I thought, watching her go. It's why we broke up, so here it is. Ed, how could you?

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.

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

I never told you that, even after telling you I love you, all those times all that day, I never told you how beautiful it was then, like everyone was telling us not to be.

I don't have to answer to you, Adam said, instantly and harshly. He brushed his pants off like he'd just buried his mother.

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 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.

And then like a song we'd forgotten was even on the mix, you stepped into the house and my whole life.

I could not, of course not, not smile at you.

After a certain age, you couldn't even say where you were from. You went someplace, and lived there. And then you went someplace else.

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.

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?

I don't think film is the writer's medium, and so I was interested to see what a director would do with it.

Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.

Why not rise from the grave and terrorize a little instead of staying buried and dead in the cemetery?

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

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

We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.

It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world.

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.

Who can I complain to, if I don't like the shape of the globe?

We thought we had time.

He thought she knew what he meant, but the biggest mistake you can make is thinking they know what you mean.

I looked for a scrape in my reflection and then, meeting my own eyes, stood for a sec and tried to figure, like all girls in all mirrors everywhere, the difference between lover and slut.

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.

All over the world are particular people, and you could be happy with probably five or six of them, eight if you're bisexual and everyone is.

Put your hair up, Min. The secret ingredient is not your hair.

I was so angry I knew it would boomerang someplace sometime soon.

You either have a feeling or you don't" - Min

Forever and ever, world without end.

If I were to say, "Yes, I am a fascinating, erudite person," what would that say about me? I don't know.

Mostly, it's flattering to meet fans. As long as it's in a planned, professional meeting, rather than, say, someone dropping by my home, which is not as pleasant.

Everyone was right about you- prove them wrong.

Who would dare think that, forever? Some idiot girl who wouldn't know how things played out.

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'm not a cuckoo, either. I'm a fool is what.

She's so, everybody's so stupid, you know? Christian too, Todd, whoever says stupid things, you're from different worlds, like you dropped here in a spaceship."
I had to say something. "Yeah," I said. "So - ?"
"So they can fuck themselves," you said. "I don't care, you know?"
I felt a smile on my face, tears too.
"Because Min, I know, OK? I'm stupid I know, about faggy movies, sorry, fuck, I'm stupid about that too. No offense. Ha! But I want to do it, Min.
Any party you want, anything, not go to bonfires. Whatever you want to do, for the eighty-ninth birthday, even though I can't remember the name."
"Lottie Carson." I stepped close to you, but you held your hands out, you weren't done.
"And they'll say things, right? I know they will, of course they will. Your friends are, probably, too, right?"
"Yes," I said. I felt furious, or furiously something, pacing with you and waiting to fall into your moving arms.
"Yes," you said, with a huge grin. "Let's stay together, I want to be with you. Let's. Yes?"
"Yes."
"Because I don't care, virginity, different, arty, weird parties with bad cake, that igloo. Just together, Min."
"Yes."
"Like everyone is telling us not to be."
"Yes!"
"Because Min, listen, I love you."
I gaped.
"Don't, you don't have to - I know it's crazy, Joan says I've really lost it, but - "
"I love you too," I said.

I want to love you and take you pretty places. Yes, I have things wrong, but also I can walk through walls if you'll let me show you.

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.

When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?

Any playlist without Prince is no friend of mine.

It is the presumed mission of all women, a quest for a man, and no amount of bloodshed can dissuade the myth. For a boy, people would say to her soon, in disbelief or even in admiration, and they would be all wrong.

It's why we broke up, Ed, a small thing that's disappeared or maybe was never really in my hands in the first place.

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

Rain, the grade school teachers say, makes the trees and flowers grow, but we're not trees and flowers, and so many grade school teachers are single.

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 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.

Gwen didn't have to ask about the Fall. It happened to all old people, the Fall. They fell and then everything changed[...]They fell and never quite got up again.

I can cook anything.

What does it mean? Where does something like this come from? How can you find it again,just what you wanted at just the right time? Never,probably. It's empty and nothing now, I don't even know why I kept it, and I'll keep it no more.

Like most writers, I look back on all of my finished works with utter regret, and the trouble with writing a series of novels is that you have to go back and read them, and make sure that you haven't forgotten anything you've created, and then when you do that, you're faced with your own mistakes on every trick, from the wrong word in places to entirely the wrong incident.

I'd made pretty clear to the people at Paramount and Dreamworks that, if they wanted Lemony Snicket to comment, he would be completely horrified by the entire film. And as long as they understood that, it was okay. I'm not much of a fan of DVD commentaries myself, so this was my way of getting revenge, in a sense, for all the puffed-up directors and stars who talk endlessly about the self-aggrandizing minutiae of making a movie.

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.

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.

May we generally be happy, generally be witty, generally be honest, but above all always be interesting.

I was once almost forced off the stage at a large chain bookstore that shall remain nameless, because she introduced me as Lemony Snicket, and I immediately interrupted her and said, "Oh no, Lemony Snicket isn't here," and then she tried to cancel the event right then and there.

I'm not a romantic, I'm a half-wit. Only stupid people would think I'm smart. I'm not something anyone should know. I'm a lunatic wandering around for scraps, I'm like every single miserable moron I've scorned and pretended I didn't recognize. I'm all of them, every last ugly thing in a bad last-minute costume. I'm not different, not at all, not different from any other speck of a thing. I'm a blemished blemish, a ruined ruin, a stained wreck so failed I can't see what I used to be.

The whole thing of what I've been trying," you said, "is that you're different, and you keep asking about the other girls, but what I mean is that I don't think about them, because of the way you are.

How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved.

They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.

If he's not gay and he hung out with you the whole time, he wanted to be. It's boyfriend or want to be boyfriend or I guess gay. Those are the choices.

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.

And this note was a jittery time bomb, ticking beneath my normal life, in my pocket all day firecely reread, in my purse all week until I was afraid it would get crushed or snooped, in my drawer between two dull books to escape my mother and then in the box and now thunked back to you. A note, who writes a note like that? Who were you to write one to me? It boomed inside me the whole time, an explosion over and over, the joy of what you wrote to me jumpy shrapnel in my bloodstream. I can't have it near me anymore, I'm grenading it back to you, as soon as I unfold it and read it and cry one more time. Because me too, and fuck you. Even now.
I can't stop thinking about you.

You fat bitch! he said, and the party gasped like a Greek chorus.

I hadn't felt such disgust for a boy since the early days, when they'd tease girls on the playground, kicking us and throwing gravel and raising their voices in high screechy mockery. "They do that because they like you," all the adults said, grinning like pumpkins. We believed them, back then. Back then we thought it was true, and we were drawn toward all that meanness because it meant we were special, let them kick us, let them like us. We liked them back. But now it was turning out that our first instincts were right. Boys weren't mean because they liked you; it was because they were mean.

Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.

You have to love the whole person, if you are truly in love.

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.

Right now I have the suspicion that the ace of diamonds is trapped forever, face down, beneath the king of diamonds, which is sneering at me like Juror Number Five, and my whole life feels like a similar misshuffle.

You winked, took the change. I should have seen it, Ed, as a sign that you were unreliable. Instead, I saw it as a sign of charming, which is why I didn't break it off right then and there.

A nice thing about children's books, though I'm probably alone in this opinion among other people who write and publish them, is that they did get to be in this unrecognized ghetto for a long time.

I had written eight drafts of the Lemony Snicket' screenplay when this changing-of-the-guard thing happened, and I said to the new producers, "I don't think I could write any more drafts." I guess I was sort of hoping they would say, "Well that's okay, this last one is perfect." But instead, they said, "It's funny you should say that. We don't think you can write any more drafts either."

I guess it's funny how life turns out?" she tried. "Not last I checked," Errol said with a snort.

All the deaths are dead for nothing but you're not dead at all.

I was never a fan of anything, and yet some people are fans of my books. That's a bit odd. But I like meeting them.

You meet people who are in pain in life and love and you forgive them for behaving the way they do.

He who wants the world must first escape from it.

And when love is over when the diner of love seems closed from the outside you want all those hours back along with anything you left at the lover's house and maybe a couple of things which aren't technically yours on the grounds that you wasted a portion of your life and those hours have all gone southside.

I don't smoke, although it looks fantastic in films. But I light matches on those thinking blank nights when I crawl my route out onto the roof of the garage and the sky while my parents sleep innocent and the lonely cars move sparse on the faraway streets, when the pillow won't stay cool and the blankets bother my body no matter how I move or lie still. I just sit with my legs dangling and light matches and watch them flicker away.

A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes.

It's okay to like jerks. I mean, it'd be better to like a nice guy, but there aren't any.

But just suddenly I really, really needed to see you again right that minute, that night.

To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we'd stop rattling, we'd adjust, we'd settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.

Every time you said it, you really said it. It wasn't like a sequel where Hollywood just lines up the same actors and hopes it works again. It was like a remake with a new director and crew trying something else and starting from scratch.

Stop saying no offense," I said, "when you say offensive things. It's not a free pass.

This is like a cookie, it tastes like a cookie having sex with a doughnut.