Quotes by Mark Haddon

• As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
• 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.
• B is for bestseller.
• Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
• I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
• For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
• From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
• 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.
• Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
• 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.
• Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
• Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
• Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
• 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.
• 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.
• There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
• Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
• 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.
• 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.