Charles Thayer

“One reason I love this passage is that it is beautiful. Another is that it saved my life. “Inspiration” is too meager a description for what these words did, but there in the psychiatric ward I remembered them and lived by their principles. The bungling hero of a novel I loved manages to think his way out of something from which there appears to be no escape; I, too, was a bungler—I literally could not stop falling down—but to some extent, I knew I was also in a prison of my own making, and I was not interested in being imprisoned any longer. I began, there in my hopeless and helpless state, to give different answers to the questions being put to me. Having deduced lines to say out loud that would let me out, I let myself out of where I was.”
― Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else?