Daniel Handler Quotes

I'm thankful that I proved myself in music which is my first love, my first passion before I got involved in this media. I am hoping to bring it back to the music now.

By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician.

I once had a young musician come to me and say that he wanted to be a professional musician. I asked him to write his list. When he came back to me, the three things in his life he most wanted were: to be paid for his music; to travel around the world; to meet new people. We came to the decision, after thinking really creatively, that if he got a job on a cruise ship, he would fulfill those goals.

When I was 15, if anything, I thought I was going to be a Delta bluesman, which is so ridiculous.

I wanted to play in a band, and I wanted to do music for a living, and that's what I dedicated my life to.

I've always known from the time I was eight years old what I wanted to do. I would have been fairly content to be someone's lead guitar player.

My mother always wanted to play an instrument. Her parents never gave her that. Then it got to a point where I'd been playing for 18 years, and to give it up would make me feel guilty. But my parents also knew that realistically, I wasn't going to become a concert pianist.

Coming back to America to pursue music is a dream.

I am still not taking my "career" in music for granted. It is constantly surprising that it works. Generally my thinking about the future has this assumption of an impending apocalypse.

We always talked [with Andrew Ridgeley] about when it would happen - we always knew that I would go on to have a solo career.

Well, since I'm six years old, I've been playing the violin, the piano, I've been singing. It's always been a dream of mine, but I really never had the courage to actually go and do it professionally.

I loved playing the guitar and I knew I was pretty good at it, so that's what I wanted to do with my life.

It would be a dream come true if I could just go from studio to studio and play solos.

But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose.

No one else in our family was a professional musician so this took an enormous leap of faith on their part.

I started bands at a pretty young age and played with my friends back in Detroit. I've always known that I wanted to do this. It was all I was ever interested in doing. I never had, outside of music, any extracurricular activities that I took part in.

Music is my thing. In fact, that's what I wanted to do. I thought of myself as a musician. I had never thought about acting.

I wanted to be so many different things in the beginning - I wanted to be a rocker, I wanted to be a great songwriter, I wanted to be a great melodic singer.

But music was never something I saw myself doing.

I wanted music to be a career. To base everything on fame to me seemed a dangerous thing - I wanted my foundations to be about improving as a performer and writer. No one could push me into going down that route of being a celebrity singer.

My dad Peter, who was my roadie when I was starting out, had loads of confidence but couldn't sing.

For me, as a kid desperate to make music, I thought the only way I could do it was to try to be a superstar - which is a fun thing to be, but it can be exhausting and degrading.

I wanted to be a guitar player and musician so badly, and I prayed to get this the very few times I went to church, and I feel like I got my prayer answered.

My father was a musician, so I feel like falling into this career was a bit inevitable.

I'd written songs since I was 16, but I never thought that I would be a musician full time.