People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.

I was researching my first novel ... and I was on the phone with a right-wing religious organization. I wanted them to mail me material that I could use in my research, but didn’t want to be permanently on their mailing list. They asked me what my name was and I opened my mouth and said “Lemony Snicket.” I thought that’s not a name that anyone would necessarily believe. But then the person on the other end of the phone said, “Is that spelled how it sounds?” Which may or may not prove something about right-wing religious organizations.

It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.

They say love's like a bus, and if you wait long enough another one will come along, but not in this place where the buses are slow and most of the cute ones are gay.

Miracles are like pimples, because once you start looking for them, you'll find more than you ever imagined possible.

The difference between a house and a home is like the difference between a man and a woman--it might be embarrassing to explain, but it would be very unusual to get them confused.

The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.

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.

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.

If an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well this isn't to bad, I don't have a left arm anymore but at least nobody will ever ask me if I'm left-handed or right-handed" but most of us would say something more along the lines of "Aaaaaa! My arm! My arm!"

The world gets grimy and the love object is in stark relief from it's surroundings. This is love, a pretty thing on an ugly street.

Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it would be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.

God is not a character in A Series of Unfortunate Events. The narrator mentions at one point that the characters often felt as if there was something powerful over them, which made no move to help them and was perhaps even laughing at their misfortune. But whether that person was God or the author is up for grabs.

There are some people who believe that home is where one hang's one's hat, but these people tend to live in closets and on little pegs.

The right boys i always toss and the wrong ones i keep on top of me like paperweights.

It is always sad when someone leaves home, unless they are simply going around the corner and will return in a few minutes with ice-cream sandwiches.

The sad truth is the truth is sad.

The burning of a book is a sad, sad sight, for even though a book is nothing but ink and paper, it feels as if the ideas contained in the book are disappearing as the pages turn to ashes and the cover and binding--which is the term for the stitching and glue that holds the pages together--blacken and curl as the flames do their wicked work. When someone is burning a book, they are showing utter contempt for all of the thinking that produced its ideas, all of the labor that went into its words and sentences, and all of the trouble that befell the author ...

Love can smack you like a seagull, and pour all over your feet like junkmail. You can't be ready for such a thing any more than salt water taffy gets you ready for the ocean.

It is one of life's bitterest truths that bedtime so often arrives just when things are really getting interesting.

There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyage, and there are those who say that there is no substitute for venturing out into the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.

Morning is an important time of day, because how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have.

Everybody has a theory.

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 used to have a half-baked philosophy as to why [the Lemony Snicket books] reached such a large readership, but then I read this interview with [conservative television host] Bill O’Reilly where he gave more or less the same line of reasoning for his success. But obviously he’s wrong, because he’s an immoral idiot. And so I concluded that I must be wrong as well. His argument—well, I don’t even want to give him any more publicity than he already has, but suffice it to say he was wrong, and so I was wrong, so I’m not repeating the philosophy and neither should he.

Grief, a type of sadness that most often occurs when you have lost someone you love, is a sneaky thing, because it can disappear for a long time, and then pop back up when you least expect it.

One of the remarkable things about love is that, despite very irritating people writing poems and songs about how pleasant it is, it really is quite pleasant.

Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make -- bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake -- if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble. Making assumptions simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and you can see at once how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated out to sea, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you'd made. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions, particularly in the morning.

There are many, many types of books in the world, which makes good sense, because there are many, many types of people, and everybody wants to read something different.

Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby- awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.

Recently, when a friend was stuck, I read two drafts of the same novel, back to back, and then had a long lunch with him, but that's the deepest I've ever dove into someone else's in-progress work. I look at friends' manuscripts all the time, but mostly, among writers, the only question we have of each other is "Have I gone completely off the deep end?" Usually the answer is no.

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.