Mark Haddon Quotes

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

You love someone, you've got to let something go.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

I want my name to mean me.

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

I find people confusing.

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.

Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

Many childrens writers dont have children of their own

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.