Daniel Handler Quotes

There'll always be serendipity involved in discovery.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

There are a million great books out there if you just go to Google. There's a lot to pull apart. A lot of crazy, unbelievable stuff that's all completely true. I get into little obsessions, and I read everything I can find on one thing, and then I move onto another.

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.

I get slightly obsessive about working in archives because you don't know what you're going to find. In fact, you don't know what you're looking for until you find it.

Most discoveries even today are a combination of serendipity and of searching.

The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don't expect.

If you want to become a biologist, it doesn't help to go into the Harvard biology library and all the information is there for you. You have to know what to look for and the internet is the same, just magnified.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

Do search, but in order to find other than what is searched for.

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

Because that's what Hermione does,' said Ron, shrugging. 'When in doubt, go to the library.

But with the library, it's like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there's so much to look at and read.

I have no internet savvy whatsoever, but I love researching things. The Internet is my library... beyond that, I'm completely intimidated by it.

To start with, look at all the books.

I don't see writing as a communication of something already discovered, as "truths" already known. Rather, I see writing as a job of experiment. It's like any discovery job; you don't know what's going to happen until you try it.

I shall be obliged to wander to the right and to the left, that I may investigate and discover the truth.

Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

Those moments when you feel you want to read something truly beautiful. The eyes make a tour of the library, and there is nothing. Then you decide to take no matter what, and it is full of beautiful things.

No use going to class unless you go to the library.

You look for one thing and you find another.

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.

A person can find anything if he takes the time, that is, if he can afford to look. And while he's looking, he's free, and he finds things he never expected.

It is true that my discovery of LSD was a chance discovery, but it was the outcome of planned experiments and these experiments took place in the framework of systematic pharmaceutical, chemical research. It could better be described as serendipity.

Serendipity... You will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called 'The Three Princes of Serendip': as their Highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.