Daniel Handler Quotes

My poems... the ones that start out as jokes become these big ponderous things and the ones that start out ponderous devolve into jokes.

I'm not really a line type of guy. I mean, pick-up lines work for some guys. You gotta really sell that thing hard. I did try one pick-up line, and it failed miserably. I thought it was really funny, but the girl didn't find it very funny.

When I came to Mumbai from Dubai to become an actor, I used to entertain people at parties by showing some card tricks.

I thought magic tricks would be a really good way to start conversations. I looked them up on YouTube and slowly mastered them.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

I'm just the least funny person in a room full of funny people, which is basically every single day of work for me.

"Do you like card tricks?" "No, I hate card tricks," I answered. "Well, I'll just show you this one." He showed me three.

Richard Pryor is my favorite stand-up ever.

Mr. Frazier makes me laugh out loud.

I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York-the Blessed Sacrament... I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.

When you open the elevator on the top floor of a building and the other guy doesn't get out, something is seriously wrong.

Is everything a joke to you?” I asked. He dabbed his tongue to his lip again. “Not everything.” “Like what?” “You.

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."

Comedy is a serious business. A serious business with only one purpose--to make people laugh.

When you go to a bar that has a black light, everybody looks cool. Except for me, because I was under the impression that the mustard stain came out.

I never did like the idea of sitting on newspapers. I did it once, and all the headlines came off on my white pants. On the level! It actually happened. Nobody bought a paper that day. They just followed me around over town and read the news on the seat of my pants.

I'm totally normal in every respect, but I have this one quirk - I can't give out a number without laughing. It's a problem when I'm giving my credit card number over the phone because they always think: 'He must have just stolen it.'

My friend named his car. And I don't want to be judgemental, but... what a dork.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

A joke is necessary at this time.

I don't mean to be gross, but the only time it's good to yell "I have diarrhea" is when you're playing Scrabble because it's worth a shitload of points.

Golf is my real profession. Entertainment is just a sideline. I tell jokes to pay my greens fees.

I'm seeing too many kind of socially awkward kids that get through schools and then they can't hold a job because they haven't learned the discipline of get up in the morning.

I love stand-up more than anything, and I'm so happy to have found a way to use it in the show.

I'm still proud of a lot of my jokes when I started.