Sometimes when someone tells a ridiculous lie, it is best to ignore it entirely.

Wherever it's good, whatever strange, faraway land, let's go there, let's stay in that place alone.

Reader: Dear Mr. Snicket, What is the best way to keep a secret? Lemony Snicket : Tell it to everyone you know, but pretend you are kidding.

I have this fantasy that the second movie would begin with a brief statement by all of the young actors who had played the children in the first movie, explaining how it had ruined their lives, so we would catch up with Emily Browning drinking heavily in the back of a burlesque bar, and maybe Liam Aiken would be living underneath a bridge, and then instead of the twins who played Sunny, we would just try to find the oldest woman in the world, and get an interview with her sitting in a trailer park.

I'm always loath to make generalizations about what is for children and what isn't. Certainly children's literature as a genre has some restrictions, so certain things will never pop up in a Snicket book. But I didn't know anything about writing for children when I started - this is the theme of naïveté creeping up on us once more - and I sort of still don't, and I'm happy that adults are reading them as well as children.

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.

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.