One has to adopt a sort of Zen calm, in which you know you wrote the best book that you could at the time.
Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.
Unless you have been very, very lucky, you have undoubtedly experienced events in your life that have made you cry. So unless you have been very, very lucky, you know that a good, long session of weeping can often make you feel better, even if your circumstances have not changed one bit.
Anyone who gives you a cinnamon roll fresh out of the oven is a friend for life.
Like People, animals will become frightened and likely do whatever you say if you whip them enough.
There are those who say that life is like a book, with chapters for each event in your life and a limited number of pages on which you can spend your time. But I prefer to think that a book is like a life, particularly a good one, which is well to worth staying up all night to finish.
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.
The thing you hope will never happen to you might just happen to someone else instead, who has been spending their life dreading the thing that will happen to you.
Death is something you cannot escape, such as death, or a cheesecake that has curdled, both of which always turn up sooner later.
Sometimes even in most unfortunate of lives there will occur a moment or two of good.
If you have ever had a miserable experience, then you have probably had it said to you that you would feel better in the morning. This, of course, is utter nonsense, because a miserable experience remains a miserable experience even on the loveliest of morning.
There are many difficult things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them.
Bad circumstances have a way of ruining things that would otherwise be pleasant.
It looked exhausting and pointless, two things that should be avoided at all costs.
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.
Sometimes words are not enough. There are some circumstances so utterly wretched that I cannot describe them in sentences or paragraphs or even a whole series of books.
It was a curious feeling, that something could be so close and so distant at the same time.
The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world.
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.
One of the most difficult things to think about in life is one’s regrets. Something will happen to you, and you will do the wrong thing, and for years afterward you will wish you had done something different.