The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies.
There are secrets everywhere. I think everyone’s parents have secrets. You just have to know where to look for them.
I was too jitterbuggy happy to sleep, and the whole day kept playing in my brain’s little screening room.
Making you happy isn’t making me happy.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but first impressions are often entirely wrong.
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.”
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.
A bolt from the blue.
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.
When you say, “History is written by the winners,” you like to think about someone who isn’t you. You want to think, “Oh, that’s the juggernaut I’m standing against.” But you’re probably part of it.
A good library will never be too neat, or too dusty, because somebody will always be in it, taking books off the shelves and staying up late reading them.
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.
If you are allergic to a thing, it is best not to put that thing in your mouth, particularly if the thing is cats.
Miracles are like meatballs, because nobody can exactly agree on what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.
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.”
It is one of life’s bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.
Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily.
The sad truth is the truth is sad.
A successful villain should have all these things at his or her villainous fingertips, or else give up villainy altogether and try to lead a life of decency, integrity, and kindness, which is much more challenging and noble, if not always quite as exciting.
Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother’s wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women.