Daniel Handler Quotes

Here we are at the bottom, almost empty. It's like confetti, these dried remnants you find in the street for a party no one invited you to. But they used to be, I can admit, part of something beautiful. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

You think everything's sexual tension," I said to Lauren, "just because you were raised my Mr. & Mrs. Super-Christian. We Jews know that underlying tensions are always due to low blood sugar."

"Yeah, well, you killed my Savior," Lauren said, and Jorda saluted good-bye. "Don't let it happen again. ~ Daniel Handler

I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I'm good for a Haydn quintet. ~ Daniel Handler

She had the look in her eye when you kick and kick at the door and it doesn't open, when you write a boy letters and letters and he never loves you, not 'til the day he dies. Not even then. ~ Daniel Handler

Making you happy isn't making me happy ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

A girl meets a boy, Ed, and everything changes, or so she says. ~ Daniel Handler

You don't say, Helena said. She took a cigarette out of her ripped purse and lit it because she smoked. She was a smoker. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

She gave me a hug and for a second I was embraced by a body that makes me want to go home and never eat again. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

One narrative, about the hated people in our lands, is that eventually they get what is coming to them. ~ Daniel Handler

I stand entwined in fire on the inextinguishable bonfire of inconceivable love. ~ Daniel Handler

I often can't remember which scenes are and aren't in the final product, because I saw so many different versions of the Lemony Snicket that I forget which ended up on the cutting-room floor. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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." ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

Dammit, Flora, why do you always ruin everything?
A prophetic remark. I hope you picked up on that. ~ Daniel Handler

Gwen was determined to screw it up, but had not yet seen how. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

I'm a lunatic wandering around for scraps. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

And the truth is that I'm not, Ed, is what I wanted to tell you. I'm not arty like everyone says who doesn't know me, I don't paint, I can't draw, I play no instrument, I can't sing. I'm not in plays, I wanted to say, I don't write poems. I can't dance except tipsy at dances. I'm not athletic, I'm not a goth or a cheerleader, I'm not treasurer or co-captain. I'm not gay and out and proud, I'm not that kid from Sri Lanka, not a triplet, a prep, a drunk, a genius, a hippie, a Christian, a slut, not even one of those super-Jewish girls with a yarmulke gang wishing everyone a happy Sukkoth. I'm not anything, this is what I realized ... I like movies, everyone knows I do
I love them
but I will never be in charge of one because my ideas are stupid and wrong in my head. There's nothing different about that, nothing fascinating, interesting, worth looking at. ~ Daniel Handler

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

I want you to love me in particular. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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? ~ Daniel Handler

To Beatrice- My love flew like a butterfly Until death swooped down like a bat As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: 'That's the end of that ~ Daniel Handler

The bus driver gave me a why-the-hell-aren't-you-at-school look and I gave him a shut-up-you're-a-bus-driver-so-bus-drive look right back. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

Everything else has vanished, so you take them now. Maybe if you're the one keeping them, I'll be the one feeling better. ~ Daniel Handler

History is written by the winners ~ Daniel Handler

You only love once and and then maybe not again. Not on a day like this. The rain, the rain, the rain. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there will be fewer and fewer of them. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

You never love a book the way you love a book when you are ten. It is an honor to be in that sacred space in some children's brains. ~ Daniel Handler

A girl's bag is an abandoned warehouse. Stupid people in horror movies are the only ones to venture in. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

You're a ghost! Eddie cried. You're empty and you have nothing inside you. ~ Daniel Handler

Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed." ~ Daniel Handler

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

It is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes; it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

And I almost said I love you. Instead I said nothing and you said nothing. ~ Daniel Handler

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

I reached out for something else and found it: the red croquet mallet, just occurring there on the ground like some easy device, some plot element stashed there for the big finale. ~ Daniel Handler

The screen shows me Portugal. The screen shows me Cairo. They have a thing where you can wander the streets. I can go anywhere I want is what the screen keeps telling me. Try this. Try there. Go around here. The world's wide open. You can wander anyplace and you'll be alone there, too. ~ Daniel Handler

I gave you an adventure, right in front of you but you never saw it until I showed you. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

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

Dear Daniel,
How do you break up with your boyfriend in a way that tells him, "I don't want to sleep with you on a regular basis anymore, but please be available for late night booty calls if I run out of other options"?
Lily
Charlotte, NC

Dear Lily,
The story's so old you can't tell it anymore without everyone groaning, even your oldest friends with the last of their drinks shivering around the ice in their dirty glasses. The music playing is the same album everyone has. Those shoes, everybody has the same shoes on. It looked a little like rain so on person brought an umbrella, useless now in the starstruck clouded sky, forgotten on the way home, which is how the umbrella ended up in her place anyway. Everyone gets older on nights like this.

And still it's a fresh slap in the face of everything you had going, that precarious shelf in the shallow closet that will certainly, certainly fall someday. Photographs slipping into a crack to be found by the next tenant, that one squinter third from the left laughing at something your roommate said, the coaster from that place in the city you used to live in, gone now. A letter that seemed important for reasons you can't remember, throw it out, the entry in the address book you won't erase but won't keep when you get a new phone, let it pass and don't worry about it. You don't think about them; "I haven't thought about them in forever," you would say if anybody brought it up, and nobody does." ~ Daniel Handler

Anybody might get drunk at the first intrrview. ~ Daniel Handler

He told her then how sorry he was for last night, but not out loud. ~ Daniel Handler

I wrote a comedy, which hopefully [Rick director] Curtiss Clayton will bring to the screen, that I thought was the antithesis of all my work. I thought it was light and sunshiny, and Mr. Clayton reminded me that it is the story of a woman kidnapped and forced to do things against her will, which is not what most people think of as light and sunshiny. ~ Daniel Handler

The more I protest that I'm not Lemony Snicket, and that I'm Daniel Handler instead, the more it becomes clear to the audience that I am in fact Lemony Snicket, that I am in fact standing in front of them. ~ Daniel Handler

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 this over. This unites us, this part of love. ~ Daniel Handler

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

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

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

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. ~ Daniel Handler

They say that when you're really in love, the world becomes gossamer and gorgeous, but in my experience the world gets grimy, and the love object is in stark relief from the surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street. ~ Daniel Handler

It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit. ~ Daniel Handler

This teaching job did not pay a lot of money, because, let's face it, nobody gives a flying fuck about education, but it was a temporary position. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

It's different," you said. "You've made, Min, everything different for me. Everything's like coffee you made me try, better than I ever - or the places I didn't even know were right on the street, you know? I'm like this thing I saw when I was little, where a kid hears a noise under his bed and there's a ladder there that's never been there before, and he climbs down and, it's for kids I know, but this song starts playing ... " Your eyes were traveling in the treey light. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

When I think about sex, you know, I want it to feel good. Not feel good, shut up, but right. Happy, not just banging away somewhere. You know, you should not just do it to do it. You should love the guy. ~ Daniel Handler

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. ~ Daniel Handler

I thought it was one thing but it was the other, it was zero zero zero alone on the bus while you slept in the room I had to leave, and that's why we broke up. ~ Daniel Handler

In America now there is this phenomenon called helicopter parenting, where you're hovering over your child for the whole time. Parents there view their job as being to make sure their kid never has a moment of unhappiness. Of course, as a parent myself, I can understand the urge, but I don't know whether it would be healthy or possible. ~ Daniel Handler

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

There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish. ~ Daniel Handler