Mark Haddon Quotes

137 quotes in 2112 categories

• I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
• I think good books have to make a few people angry.
• I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
• 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…
• I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
• I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
• I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
• 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• I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
• 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.
• Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
• My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
• 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…
• 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.
• The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
• 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.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…

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