It was darker than a pitch-black panther, covered in tar, eating black licorice at the very bottom of the deepest part of the Black Sea.

They didn't understand it, but like so many unfortunate events in life, just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it isn't so.

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

I guess we’ll be traveling in uncharted waters.” “That’ll be fun,” Phil said.

With the publishing of The Basic Eight, it was often assumed that I was really immature and callow, and with the publishing of Watch Your Mouth, it was assumed that I was oversexualized, and with Lemony Snicket, it's often assumed that I'm erudite and depressed. But all the voices more or less came naturally to me.

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.

The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth both have first-person voices, and I ended up investigating those voices and investing so much in them that I think many people took them more seriously than they ought to have.