QUOTES by Mark Haddon
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you.
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My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!
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Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them.
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I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
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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 time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.
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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.
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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.
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With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
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I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
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I always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.
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I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine horror.
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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.
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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.
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I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
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If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.
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The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
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I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
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The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'
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What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.
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You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
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When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
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Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
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There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
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The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
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If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
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I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
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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.
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I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
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I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
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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 from the stuff going on around us.
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I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
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I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
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From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
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Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
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As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
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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.
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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 middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.
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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.
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Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
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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 pretty good trick to pull off.
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I'm a writer! If you work in an office, it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you.
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