Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is the author of seven novels, including Why We Broke Up, We Are Pirates, All The Dirty Parts and, most recently, Bottle Grove.
As Lemony Snicket, he is responsible for numerous books for children, including the thirteen-volume A Series of Unfortunate Events, the four-volume All the Wrong Questions, and The Dark, which won the Charlotte Zolotow Award.
Mr. Snicket’s first book for readers of all ages, Poison for Breakfast, will be published by Liveright/W.W. Norton on August 31, 2021.
Handler has received commissions from the San Francisco Symphony, Berkeley Repertory Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has collaborated with artist Maira Kalman on a series of books for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and with musicians Stephin Merritt (of the Magnetic Fields), Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists) and Torquil Campbell (of Stars).
His books have sold more than 70 million copies and have been translated into 40 languages, and have been adapted for film, stage and television, including the recent adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events for which he was awarded both the Peabody and the Writers Guild of America awards.
He lives in San Francisco with the illustrator Lisa Brown, to whom he is married and with whom he has collaborated on several books and one son.
“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.”
“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.”
“They looked at each other like a pair of parentheses.”
“It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.”
“Friends can make you feel that the world is smaller and less sneaky than it really is.”
“We need things, and the opposite of them, and we are so rarely completely comfortable.”
“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.”
“There is only laughing across the land as the car moves you along, on your way someplace with love in the car.”
“We laughed the rest of the way, because the point of this story is, it is not the cookies. It is the love.”
“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.”
“Once more, this is love: it rings and you open up unless it looks like an ax murderer.”
“Love is candy from a stranger, but it's candy you've had before and it probably won't kill you.”
“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.”
“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?”
“All the deaths are dead for nothing but you're not dead at all.”
“lately it has become more and more difficult to attend dinner parties without the evening ending in gunfire or tapioca...”
“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 have a dream of what would have happened if what happened instead hadn't.”
“Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junk mail.”
“Everybody has a theory.”
“Love was in the air, so both of us walked through love on our way to the corner.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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. ”
“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.”
“The rinsed foam swirled into one drain that always clogged come October when the maples dropped Canadian propaganda over everything.”