Mark Haddon

“Prime numbers is what is left when you have taken all the patterns away.”

— Mark Haddon

“Never trust a man who doesn't like animals. That's my rule.”

— Mark Haddon

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

— Mark Haddon

I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

— Mark Haddon

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

— Mark Haddon

“Sit still long enough and everything will come to you.”

— Mark Haddon

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

— Mark Haddon

... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.

— Mark Haddon

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

— Mark Haddon

“sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.”

— Mark Haddon

“He said, 'are you telling the truth?' I said, 'Yes. I always tell the truth.”

— Mark Haddon

I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.

— Mark Haddon

“I said that I wasn’t clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn’t clever. That was just being observant.”

— 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…

— Mark Haddon

“but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean…

— Mark Haddon

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

— Mark Haddon

“Sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army Knife if they hit me and if I kill…

— Mark Haddon

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard…

— Mark Haddon

“...most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and…

— Mark Haddon

“... a rhetorical question. It has a question mark at the end, but you are not meant to answer it because the…

— Mark Haddon

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They…

— Mark Haddon

I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are…

— Mark Haddon

“Ray was disappointed by the (Millenium) wheel. Too well engineered, he said. He wanted the wind in his hair and a rusty…

— Mark Haddon

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We…

— Mark Haddon

“And herein lies the key to the brilliance of Mark Haddon’s choice of narrator: The most wrenching of emotional moments are chronicled…

— Mark Haddon

“The rule for working out prime numbers is very simple, but no one has ever worked out a simple formula for telling…

— Mark Haddon

“Miaow Consider me. I sit here like Tiberius, inscrutable and grand. I will let "I dare not" wait upon "I would" and…

— Mark Haddon

“And it was strange because he was calling, "Christopher. . . ? Christopher. . . ?" and I could see my name…

— Mark Haddon

“Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could…

— Mark Haddon

Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted,…

— 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…

— Mark Haddon

And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the…

— Mark Haddon

“i find people confusing. this is for 2 main reasons.”

— Mark Haddon

“...companionship refused is worse than loneliness.”

— Mark Haddon

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

— Mark Haddon

“She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog.”

— 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…

— Mark Haddon

“And outside the window was like a map, except it was in 3 dimensions and it was life-size because it was the…

— Mark Haddon

Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is…

— Mark Haddon

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

— Mark Haddon