Daniel Handler Quotes

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

The better day, the worse deed.

We all have that capacity, to be two things. And after all I was named for both the devil and the angel. Demonio y angel. Dem-y-an.

There's not one person in the world that's not a living, walking contradiction.

I hated this. I hated knowing what I wanted and knowing what was right and knowing they weren't the same thing.

He is the very Janus of poets; he wears almost everywhere two faces; and you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

I hate violence, yes I do. It's kind of a dilemma, huh?.

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on - the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict every human being has a part.

By blood a king, in heart a clown.

It's very strange that you condemn me as a terrorist at the same time as you call on me to help you combat terrorism in Iraq and elsewhere. It doesn't make sense!

I both love and do not love; and am mad and not mad.

When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the 'Ghost Rider' comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn't get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening - 'How is this possible, this duality?'

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

There's something in the German language that makes you feel like you're getting a hug and a backstab at the same time.

Good can exist in bad, and bad can exist in good. It's not black and white.

Oh, I am an angel, though sometimes I wish I was more of a devil.

I feel like humans, when you're faced with decisions, you can go up and down: duality.

It is one of those problems of human nature, which may be noted down, but not solved; - although Ralph felt no remorse at that moment for his conduct towards the innocent, true-hearted girl; although his libertine clients had done precisely what he had expected, precisely what he most wished, and precisely what would tend most to his advantage, still he hated them for doing it, from the very bottom of his soul.

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Maybe most people were fundamentally contradictory. The real people at any rate.

For we have thought the longer thoughts And gone the shorter way. And we have danced to devils' tunes, Shivering home to pray; To serve one master in the night, Another in the day.

I hate, and yet must love the thing I hate.