Mark Haddon quotes - page 2

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)
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
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.
Mark Haddon
You love someone, you've got to let something go.
Mark Haddon
... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
Mark Haddon
In life, you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do.
Mark Haddon
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
Mark Haddon
I want my name to mean me.
Mark Haddon
... and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
Mark Haddon
And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery...and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
Mark Haddon
I find people confusing. (Mark Haddon)
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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
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
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
Mark Haddon
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.
Mark Haddon
With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
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
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 was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
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)
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
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
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 started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
Mark Haddon