Daniel Handler Quotes

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you'll need right up to the day you die.

I'm late to everything. I've always wanted to have it written in my will that when I die, the coffin shows up a half hour late and says on the side, like in gold, 'Sorry I'm Late'.

Soon I'll be old and I've done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I'll become senile before I've finished what I've undertaken.

Everyone who is taken by death asks for more time, while everyone who still has time makes excuses for procrastination.

People can be so neglectful of each other and of their own heritage - then death intrudes. Conversations we wish that we'd had earlier are had too late.

I look at 'Death Proof' and realize I had too much time.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

How mankind defers from day to day the best it can do, and the most beautiful things it can enjoy, without thinking that every day may be the last one, and that lost time is lost eternity!

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

I think about death. I don't want to die with clothes in the cleaners.

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

The biggest fear I have is to die with regrets, and of course that will come true.

It is the loose ends with which men hang themselves.

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes, work never begun.

Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.

It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it.

I didn't want to die - not before I'd finished reading The Return of the Native anyhow.

If you always dreamed of writing a novel or a memoir, and you used to love to write, and were pretty good at it, will it break your heart if it turns out you never got around to it? If you wake up one day at eighty, will you feel nonchalant that something always took precedence over a daily commitment to discovering your creative spirit? If not--if this very thought fills you with regret--then what are you waiting for?

The trouble is that you think you have time.

A man has one, a cat has nine, and in between it's killing time.

When you kill time, remember that it has no resurrection.