Quotes By Mark Haddon
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
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
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.
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
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
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
Mark Haddon
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
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've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
Mark Haddon
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
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
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
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
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
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
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.
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 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
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
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
If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.
Mark Haddon
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
Mark Haddon
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
Mark Haddon