It doesn't take courage to kill someone,' Klaus said. 'It takes a severe lack of moral stamina.

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.

But one type of book that practically no one likes to read is a book about the law. Books about the law are notorious for being very long, very dull, and very difficult to read. This is one reason many lawyers make heaps of money. The money is an incentive - the word "incentive" here means "an offered reward to persuade you to do something you don't want to do - to read long, dull, and difficult books.

Boredom is not black licorice, Snicket," she said. "There's no reason to share it with me.

It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or later. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult.

I don't think film is the writer's medium, and so I was interested to see what a director would do with it.

...in life it is often the tiny details that end up being the most important.