If you don’t care about something, one way to demonstrate your feelings is to say the word and then repeat the word with the letters S-C-H-M replacing the first letters. Somebody who didn’t care about dentists, for instance could say ‘Dentist, schmentists.

I didn't realize this was a sad occasion.

Literature doesn’t exactly have a strong mental-health track record.

The story of the Baudelaires takes place in a very real world, where some people are laughed at just because they have something wrong with them, and where children can find themselves all alone in the world, struggling to understand the mystery that surrounds them.

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.

Labor Day is a holiday honoring those who work for a living. Laborious Day is a lesser known holiday honoring those who cannot stop talking about their work.

A new experience can be extremely pleasurable, or extremely irritating, or somewhere in between, and you never know until you try it out.