Mark Haddon

(12 votes)   I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

Mark Haddon
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(8 votes)   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
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(8 votes)   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
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(7 votes)   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
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(7 votes)   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
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(6 votes)   Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

Mark Haddon
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(19 votes)   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
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(15 votes)   Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Mark Haddon
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(12 votes)   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
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(9 votes)   From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

Mark Haddon
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(9 votes)   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
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(9 votes)   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
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(8 votes)   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
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(8 votes)   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
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(7 votes)   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
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