Daniel Handler Quotes
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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.
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The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is 'Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War One is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand'. -Lemony Snicket
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What a bad day it was, the clouds were low and cloudy, the rain no fun, and the dark as it hit the late afternoon thick like someone who stops by your place and just won't leave. The day was canceled, almost, on account of the rain spilling itself over everything.
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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.
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'I'm not - the terrific guy you keep telling me about. I'm not made of sugar and spice and everything nice. I'm made of rats and snails and puppy-dogs tails. I lie sometimes. I have broken people's hearts. I'm looking for love, I'll admit that, but now that it's here in abundance, I'm afraid of commitment and I want you, please, to leave me.'
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'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'.
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What can be hidden in a book?
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It was the sort of day when people walk in the park and solve problems. 'We'll simply call the taxi company, David, and request a large one, like one of those vans.' Is the sort of thing you would overhear if you were overhearing in the park.
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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.
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Miracles are like meatballs because nobody knows what they are made of, where they came from or how often they should appear.
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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.
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Olaf: I'm a genius! I've solved all of our problems! Look!Violet: Renaming the boat doesn't solve any of our problems.
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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.
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Klaus: Maybe I don't know what 'cakesniffer' means, but I think I can translate our new school's motto... If I'm not mistaken, 'Memento Mori' means 'Remember you will die'.
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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.
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It's always dawnest before dark
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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.
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I'll have ten grams of rice, Mrs. Bass interrupted, one tenth of a hectogram of shrimp vindaloo, a dekagram of chana aloo masala, one thousand centigrams of tandori salmon, four samosas with surface area of nineteen cubic centimeters, five deciliters of mango lassi, and a sada rava dosai that's exactly nineteen centimeters long.
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If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.
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I can't stand the lyrics.
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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.
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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.
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Why, you're all grown up! The last time I saw you I was trying to throw thumbtacks into your cradle!
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This world is suchier than we are, and the best thing to do is keep moving and find your keys.