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…

— Mark Haddon

“And Father said, “Christopher, do you understand that I love you?” And I said “Yes,” because loving someone is helping them when…

— 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…

— 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…

— Mark Haddon

“He asked whether I wanted to become an astronaut and I said I did. He said that it was very difficult to…

— Mark Haddon

Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two…

— Mark Haddon

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of…

— Mark Haddon

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because…

— Mark Haddon

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves…

— Mark Haddon

“And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug…

— Mark Haddon

“All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what…

— Mark Haddon

“Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feeling are just having a picture…

— Mark Haddon

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work…

— Mark Haddon

“Mr. Jeavons, the psychologist at the school, once asked me why 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day,…

— Mark Haddon

“On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, It rained very hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence…

— Mark Haddon

“A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a…

— Mark Haddon

“I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog…

— Mark Haddon

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car…

— Mark Haddon

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have…

— Mark Haddon

But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be…

— Mark Haddon

“people believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as…

— Mark Haddon

“Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over…

— Mark Haddon

“He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your…

— Mark Haddon

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and…

— Mark Haddon

“But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break…

— Mark Haddon

“But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because…

— Mark Haddon

“And it means that sometimes thing are so complicated that it is impossible to predict what they are going to do next,…

— Mark Haddon

“Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can…

— Mark Haddon

“Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful,…

— 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…

— Mark Haddon

I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet…

— Mark Haddon

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like…

— Mark Haddon

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught…

— Mark Haddon

“That was what it meant, didn’t it. Being good. You didn’t have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn’t have to…

— Mark Haddon

“Reading is primarily a symptom. Of a healthy imagination, of our interest in this and other worlds, of our ability to be…

— Mark Haddon

...people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal,…

— Mark Haddon

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up…

— Mark Haddon

“Quando avrò una laurea in matematica, o in fisica, o in matematica e fisica, troverò un lavoro e guadagnerò un sacco di…

— Mark Haddon