It was a secret time and place, you next to me, untraceable and out of this world

And a refrigerator may hold a basket of strawberries, which would be important if a maniac said to you, "If you don't give me a basket of strawberries right now, I'm going to poke you with this large stick." But when the two elder Baudelaires and Quigley Quagmire opened the refrigerator, they found nothing that would help someone who was wounded, dying of thirst, or being threatened by a strawberry-crazed, stick-carrying maniac.

I found powerful the idea that everything we have is, in effect, stolen from everybody else.

It is often difficult to admit that someone you love is not perfect, or to consider aspects of a person that are less than admirable.

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.

Well-read people are less likely to be evil.

I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.