Daniel Handler Quotes

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

I am who I am, you are who you are, and everything else is a perception based on acceptance, deception, smoke, mirrors, and so on. It's what's between us that seems to justify our accidental identities.

Your inability to see yourself clearly is what's keeping you alive.

My personality doesn't interest me.

I know what my identity is.

I like when people know exactly, have a good sense of themselves, and know exactly what's good for them, I admire that, but I don't have anywhere near that kind of perspective on my own.

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.

Even if I don't like what I am, I know what I am. My children like what they are, but they don't know what they are. So tell me which is worse.

What does it mean to know and experience my own “nothingness?” It is not enough to turn away in disgust from my illusions and faults and mistakes, to separate myself from them as if they were not, and as if I were someone other than myself. This kind of self-annihilati on is only a worse illusion, it is a pretended humility which, by saying “I am nothing” I mean in effect “I wish I were not what I am.

We often mistake the original part of ourselves for a weakness.

People have to learn who they are - you can't have somebody else telling you who you are.

I've read a lot of different versions of myself - and all of them are true because it's all opinion, and they're as accurate as it can ever be. But I don't think that I've been deft at hiding parts of my personality.

It's not always easy to identify your own voice. It comes with time.

I know who I am and what I do.

Knowing yourself and expressing it is hip. I think knowing yourself is the real journey, for me anyway.

I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts.

We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.

I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you're older, I think, is that you really must make the self.

I think part of maturity is knowing who you are.

Things are not always as they seem; the first appearance deceives many.

It seems that different people have an idea of what I am, and what I should be. And then there's me.

One of my problems is to find the self.

Believing: it means believing in our own lies. And I can say that I am grateful that I got this lesson very early.

No one has ever learned fully to know themselves.

I don't think I gain anything by seeing myself.