Daniel Handler

“There were a million things, everything, I didn't know. I was stupid, the official descriptive phrase for happy. I took this thing I'm giving you back, this thing you gave me as the star we were waiting for finally emerged.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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'd ruin any day, all my days, for those long nights with you. And I did. But that right there was why it was doomed.”

“I can cook anything.”

“I'm nothing, not a single thing. The only particle I had, the only tiny thing raising me up, is that I was Ed Slaterton's girlfriend, loved by you for like ten secs, and who cares, so what, and not anymore so how embarrassing for 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We thought we had time. I waved but couldn't answer, because I was finally letting myself grin as wide as I'd wanted all afternoon, all evening, every sec of every minute with you, Ed. Shit, I guess I already loved you then.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“You know I want to be a directos, but you could never truly see the movies in my head and that, Ed, is why we broke up.”

“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.”

“'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'.”

“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.”

“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.”