Mark Haddon quotes - page 4

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person. (Mark Haddon)
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules. View quote
Mark Haddon
Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince. View quote
Mark Haddon
A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot. View quote
Mark Haddon
I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that. View quote
Mark Haddon
If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children. View quote
Mark Haddon
When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician. View quote
Mark Haddon
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later. View quote
Mark Haddon
There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane. View quote
Mark Haddon
B is for bestseller. View quote
Mark Haddon
As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort. (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. View quote
Mark Haddon
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. View quote
Mark Haddon
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books. View quote
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. View quote
Mark Haddon
As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture. View quote
Mark Haddon
I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful. View quote
Mark Haddon
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families. View quote
Mark Haddon
Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable. View quote
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. View quote
Mark Haddon
You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real. (Mark Haddon)
I think good books have to make a few people angry. View quote
Mark Haddon
Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life. View quote
Mark Haddon
I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life. View quote
Mark Haddon
I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe. View quote
Mark Haddon