Daniel Handler Quotes

I think I always wanted to have adventures in my life. I was always kind of a rambunctious kid.

I was a bit of a wild boy - always swimming and exploring the mountains.

Even as a kid in the Bronx, I wanted an adventurous life.

Even though you're growing up, you should never stop having fun.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

I have three sons, and the oldest wants to play pirates all the time. It has all these associations of living some kind of very free life. It's interesting for me as a filmmaker to show a whole different side of that.

I am part of this generation with 'Pirates of the Caribbean' and 'Peter Pan.' I think we all grew up in this culture of pirates.

When I see birches bend to left and right... I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

From the time I was a kid, I had a wanderlust. I always wanted to travel, in any form - plane, train, boat, car, motorcycle. So I think that if I ever do have a mid-life crisis, I have all the toys to refer to quickly.

I'm no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an adult is this and only this: when I was a child, I longed to travel into, to live in wonder. Now, I know, as much as I can know anything, that to travel into wonder is to be wonder. So it matters little whether I travel by plane, by rowboat, or by book. Or, by dream. I do not see, for there is no I to see. That is what the pirates know. There is only seeing and, in order to go to see, one must be a pirate.

I was never much of a reader when I was a boy. Books bored me. I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I'd imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them.

I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings.

It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.

As a little kid, I climbed a lot of trees because I always loved the bird's-eye view.

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

Ideas come from ordinary, everyday life. And from imagination. And from feelings. And from memories. Memories of dust in my sneakers and humming whitewalls down a hill called Monkey.

Every western I did and will do; I will do it for the never ending young kid inside of me.

Sendak's 1963 classic 'Where The Wild Things Are' has long been a favorite of mine because of the creative imagery, fantastic adventures and, most of all, because of how this timeless story shows us that children need to be free to roam, explore and invent in order to understand their place in the world that surrounds them.

I've always been inspired by small details that make me wander. My mother would ask me, 'What are you looking at so intensely?' I would answer, 'Everything and nothing.' She really supported my wanderings, called me Marco Polo.

When I was young, I was everywhere.

Children should enjoy the few years they have just being a kid.

Boys, particularly, like stories where they can have images in their imagination, where they can go to scary places and experiment with what can happen.

You know, it's kind of hard because I really - I see kids on their Rollerblades and their bikes, and just running around, climbing trees, and I used to do that. And I loved doing that.

Australians don't have a preconceived notion of what things have to be... we can go on a fantastic journey.