Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else.

Never, under any circumstances, let the Virginian wolfsnake near a typewriter.

It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.

You would run much slower if you were dragging something behind you, like a knapsack or a sheriff.

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.

Like a lot of people whose children were small in the 2000s, I read [Daniel Handler] books out loud and I loved them.

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