Daniel Handler Quotes

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

The only advice anybody can give is, if you wanna be a writer, keep writing. And read all you can, read everything.

When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I am happy to keep working on books because I'm always reading, and I'm always trying to fall in love.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

Becoming the reader is the essence of becoming a writer.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

My childhood was spent in my local library in a San Diego suburb. It's where I became a writer - by 1st becoming a reader!

Reading makes me want to write my own books, and just trying to understand what I see in the world around me makes me want to figure things out.

The worst advice a young writer can get is "Write what you know." Imagination is more important than experience.

What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.

I was always writing. When I was a little kid, before I learned how to write, I would tell stories. But as soon I as capable, I started writing. I filled notebooks and notebooks until I got my first computer when I was 11. It never really occurred to me that I would do anything else.

You can't write if you don't read.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

What better way to expand your imagination than to read!

Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.

Part of my job as Children's Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well - to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.