Daniel Handler Quotes

The trouble with talking about irony is, it's such a slippery thing that the second you start talking about it, you're a better example of it than you are an analyst.

Even if that were true, it wouldn't be irony," Lucas pointed out. "Irony is the contrast between what's said and what happens.

Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency.

That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.

I don't like the word ironic. I like the word absurdity, and I don't really understand the word 'irony' too much. The irony comes when you try to verbalize the absurd. When irony happens without words, it's much more exalted.

When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.

The act of seeing any film generally is you knowing more than the characters, even if it's the classic Hitchcock shot of two people talking and a bomb being under the table. Part of the pleasure of it is seeing where people go wrong, and the irony of situations.

The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.

Take it not amiss, O speech, that I borrow weighty words, and later try hard to make them seem light.

It is the test of a novel writer's art that he conceal his snake-in-the-grass; but the reader may be sure that it is always there.

A girl phoned me the other day and said... 'Come on over, there's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home.

The exact meaning of irony is so narrow that the word is hardly worth using; in its broad, current definition, it's a euphemism for sarcasm. 'I'm not being sarcastic; I'm being ironic.' No, you're not. You're evading the responsibility for being sarcastic.

My lip curls in a snide reflex whenever I hear that a new novel is written from the point of view of a child or a monster, a lunatic or an animal. I immediately expect a nasty coyness of tone, cheesy artifice, the world through cardboard 3-D lenses.

None of the people are what you think when you first meet them, who you think they are, and they turn out to be maybe something a little different.

It's an astonishing skill that people can read, and read well. Very few people can read well. For instance, I have to be very careful with irony, saying something while meaning the exact opposite.

Egotism exists everywhere, but it has a different flavor in England, where the tabloid culture goes much deeper. It's just the indulgence of vulgarity, the wallowing in vulgarity. As with everything English, there's a sort of irony to it. They write a great deal about these trivial people who have a certain eminence, always with a bit of, "Isn't it ridiculous that we are writing about this person?"

It was a bit of fun. But of course like anything that starts as a joke, people started to take it all seriously!

For dhrames always go by conthraries, my dear.

You're so connected to people and they all know how to get to you, and everyone knows who you are, so explicitly. They think they know you. It's like, 'You really think you know me? I don't know me! How do you know I'm not different around someone else?

I am always surprised when people read double entendres into my innocuous babble.

Irony is based on insecurity; people like to not like things because they don't understand them.

I dress normal because I want people to treat me regular. And their brains explode. It's really fun.

Some people don't get it when I'm being sarcastic.

The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.