Top 100 Daniel Handler Quotes
#1. 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
#2. I stayed there loving you, though the love made me, not sad but I guess melancholy, for a reason I couldn't point
to.
Daniel Handler
#3. 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.
Daniel Handler
#5. One narrative, about the hated people in our lands, is that eventually they get what is coming to them.
Daniel Handler
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. This is complicated," you said, back on the napkin, and then looked at me. You wanted to pry me open, I could see it, drag me across our boundaries so we could feast together in secret from the rest of the world. "But," you said, "no, not but. I love you.
Daniel Handler
#10. I always think it's silly when people talk about works of culture taking risks. Because there's not any risk involved.
Daniel Handler
#11. 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
#14. 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.
Daniel Handler
#15. 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.
Daniel Handler
#16. 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
#17. The rinsed foam swirled into one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything.
Daniel Handler
#18. 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.
Daniel Handler
#19. I opened my mouth and kissed you then, the first time all night, attacked you and surrendered completely, and let's get out of here. I'm ready, I'm finished, let's not break up, no, no. Take me home, my boyfriend, my love.
Daniel Handler
#20. Numbersign questionmark you" and "Asterisk exclamation point the world.
Daniel Handler
#21. I guess it's funny how life turns out?" she tried. "Not last I checked," Errol said with a snort.
Daniel Handler
#22. The right boys I always toss and the wrong ones I keep on top of me like paperweights.
Daniel Handler
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. I wrote Rick before I was published, and I had no vision of it, really. It was just a story that occurred to me, and that put its little claws in my brain, and I wrote it, and I showed it to a couple people, and they all said, "This is ghastly."
Daniel Handler
#26. Love is really liking someone a whole lot and not wanting to screw that up.
Daniel Handler
#27. May we generally be happy, generally be witty, generally be honest, but above all always be interesting.
Daniel Handler
#28. 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.
Daniel Handler
#29. 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.
Daniel Handler
#30. Come on in, I said again, and he came on in and I hugged him. I felt his arms, warm through the linen. Suddenly there was a reason to leave the house and see other humans, because some of them were good.
Daniel Handler
#31. 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.
Daniel Handler
#32. Weekends and weekdays, when you knew I was looking and when you didn't even guess I was alive. Even with shiny stars bothering your head it was beautiful.
Daniel Handler
#33. It's funny, particularly when you're a writer and you're doing well, you have that sense of like, "Oh! My view of the world is the one that's going to be published."
Daniel Handler
#34. Gwen was determined to screw it up, but had not yet seen how.
Daniel Handler
#35. Dark, light, dark, light, dark-I swung and missed.
Daniel Handler
#36. When you're at sea," Gwen would probably reply, "it's not food. It's fuel, for further exploits."
"So the exploit fuels the next exploit, and the next the next, and so on? Is there nothing more, nothing else?"
"Is there ever?
Daniel Handler
#37. How do you do?" said Violet. "How do you do?" said Klaus. "Odo yow!" said Sunny.
Daniel Handler
#38. 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
#39. Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.
Daniel Handler
#40. Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.
Daniel Handler
#41. I'm not very good at the accordion. If I played guitar, I wouldn't be on anyone's album. But because I play the accordion and no one else does, I end up doing strange things.
Daniel Handler
#43. 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.
Daniel Handler
#44. 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
#45. And I almost said I love you. Instead I said nothing and you said nothing.
Daniel Handler
#46. It's okay to like jerks. I mean, it'd be better to like a nice guy, but there aren't any.
Daniel Handler
#47. 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?
Daniel Handler
#48. 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.
Daniel Handler
#49. Normally it is not polite to go into somebody's room without knocking, but you can make an exception if the person is dead, or pretending to be dead.
Daniel Handler
#50. 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
#51. We steal the happiness of others in order to be happy ourselves, and when it is stolen from us we voyage desperately to steal it back.
Daniel Handler
#52. 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.
Daniel Handler
#53. I have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.
Daniel Handler
#54. It's one thing for forgive yourself a mistake. But if you knew it was a mistake at the time, how do you forgive yourself then?
Daniel Handler
#55. When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?
Daniel Handler
#56. Do you do them in that old-fashioned code,like daffodils mean I'm sorry I was late, daisies mean sorry I embarrassed you in front of your friends, these things here fanned out mean just thinking of you?Or did you just have them throw whatever was pretty together?
Daniel Handler
#57. It was like an apple running for Congress, a bike rack wearing a bathing suit.
Daniel Handler
#58. I hadn't even been looking, not for you, and now you were my heart's desire.
Daniel Handler
#59. I was so angry I knew it would boomerang someplace sometime soon.
Daniel Handler
#60. 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.
Daniel Handler
#61. One has to adopt a sort of Zen calm, in which you know you wrote the best book that you could at the time.
Daniel Handler
#62. I'm very happy for you guys. I heard my voice, so false it was all the statues could do to keep themselves from rolling their eyes.
Daniel Handler
#63. Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.
Daniel Handler
#64. Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.
Daniel Handler
#65. I couldn't wait to see then again, beautiful things. Extraordinary.
Daniel Handler
#66. Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you're kidding.
Daniel Handler
#67. Another gift, another secret, another time to lean in and kiss me.
Daniel Handler
#68. Every new promise was like something heavy I had to carry, with no place to put anything down.
Daniel Handler
#69. 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.
Daniel Handler
#70. I kind of always think my work is unfilmable, and when I meet people who are interested in filming it, I'm always stunned.
Daniel Handler
#71. She licked her lips and then wiped them on her hand, her dark lipstick staining her wrist like a suicide.
Daniel Handler
#73. So she loved him. She just did immediately and again often and clearly naturally and soundly and obviously and many others.
Daniel Handler
#74. I think pirates, like astronauts, particularly for a boy, are always kind of worth thinking about.
Daniel Handler
#75. Relax," she said. "You will be wise. You're young. You can't have everything right away." When something simple and true takes you by surprise, it hits you in the stomach.
Daniel Handler
#76. 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.
Daniel Handler
#77. Every last souvenir of the love we had, the prizes & the debris of this relationship, like the glitter in the gutter when the parade has passed, all the everything & whatnot kicked to the curb.
Daniel Handler
#79. 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
#81. 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
#82. The flames rose bright on everyone's screens, flickering lipstick red and traffic-cone orange and Lord knows what else, depending on how your television's colour was.
Daniel Handler
#83. 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.
Daniel Handler
#84. You only love once and and then maybe not again. Not on a day like this. The rain, the rain, the rain.
Daniel Handler
#85. You fat bitch! he said, and the party gasped like a Greek chorus.
Daniel Handler
#86. 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
#87. I gave you an adventure, right in front of you but you never saw it until I showed you.
Daniel Handler
#88. 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
#89. After all, I was only eighteen then. I'm almost twenty now. I learned lots about narrative structure in my Honors English classes so I know what I'm doing.
Daniel Handler
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I saw myself, clearly, a scorned woman drunk and angry at a party. Hell hath no fury etc.
Daniel Handler
#94. There is only laughing across the land as the car moves you along, on your way someplace with love in the car.
Daniel Handler
#95. It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world.
Daniel Handler
#96. 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.
Daniel Handler
#98. I liked, I admit, that we didn't pretend there hadn't been other girls. There was always a girl on you in the halls at school, like they came free with a backpack.
Daniel Handler
#99. My general writing preface is to write an outline and then ignore about half of it, both on a micro level with the individual book, and on a macro level with the series as a whole, and that's pretty much what's happened.
Daniel Handler
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