Mark Haddon Quotes

137 quotes in 2112 categories

• 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…
• 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.…
• 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.…
• I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the…
• I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the…
• 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…
• I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own…
• I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a…
• 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…
• 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…
• Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not…
• And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree…
• 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…
• ...people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings…
• ... He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a…
• ...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
• And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they…
• At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your…
• Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which…
• All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.

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