I can't stomach any kind of notion that serious fiction is good for us, because I don't believe that everything that's wrong with the world has a cure.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?

The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.

Today's Baudelaires are hip-hop artists.

Family's the one thing you can't change. You can cover yourself with tattoos. You can get a grapefruit-sized ring going through your earlobe. You can change your name. You can move to a different continent. But you cannot change who your parents were, and who your siblings are, and who your children are.

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.