Mark Haddon Quotes

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Mark Haddon

Profession : Novelist

Birth : September 26, 1962

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.

Mark Haddon

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.

Mark Haddon

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.

Mark Haddon

I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you.

Mark Haddon

A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

Mark Haddon

I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.

Mark Haddon

B is for bestseller.

Mark Haddon

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Mark Haddon

The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

Mark Haddon

I'm a writer! If you work in an office, it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you.

Mark Haddon

I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine horror.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon