Mark Haddon Quotes

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Mark Haddon

Profession : Novelist

Birth : September 26, 1962

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.

Mark Haddon

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

Mark Haddon

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.

Mark Haddon

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

Mark Haddon

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

Mark Haddon

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.

Mark Haddon