Mark Haddon quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Mark Haddon on Wise Famous Quotes.

Which was what she hated about the countryside, no distraction from the dirty messed-up workings of the heart.

The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'

Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance.

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

She can feel it all, centuries of habitation, paint over paint over plaster over stone.

All those other lives. You never did get to lead them.

said this. He kept on looking through

Maybe it wasn't God after all, maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.

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.

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.

All brave men are slightly stupid.

I want my narre to mean me.

I find people confusing.

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 people.

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

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

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

Loving someone is helping them when they get in trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth ...

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

And outside the window was like a map, except it was in 3 dimensions and it was life-size because it was the thing it was a map of.

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 insight into their own.

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

The police asked us whether we wanted counselling. We said we'd prefer a hot supper.

Everyone in their little worlds.

Sit still long enough
and everything will come to you.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

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.

He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your hair and it looks like old rope.

Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.

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

You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.

People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark.

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.

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.

He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silcence but not empty.

She watched the children the way a snake might watch a cat.

Most men wanted to tell you what they knew. The route to Wisbech. How to get a log fire going. David made her feel she was the one who knew things. He

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house.

For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.

Time is only the relationship between the different things changing

Like when you wake up at night, and the only sounds you hear are the sounds inside your head.

Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did.

There's something with the physical size of America ... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

And intuition is what people is what people use in life to make decisions.But logic can help you work out the right answer.

That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds.

So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real.

Also had a very hairy nose. It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils.1

Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating

Companionship refused is worse than loneliness.

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

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

You love someone, you've got to let something go.

I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them

.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

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

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

To be honest, I'm trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

[I]t is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.

He smelled of something I do not know the name of which Father often smells of when he comes home from work.

I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

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.

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

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

Life is a cowpat sandwich Jimbo.' he sighed 'with a very thin bread and lots of filling.

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.

And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.

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.

That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn't be washed off.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

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

How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.

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

Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.

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.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Mad as a fucking hatter. Jesus,

Lord alone knows." George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. "The mystery of one's children is never-ending.

Metaphors are lies.

Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible.

And it came to Daisy out of the blue. Her mother was a human being. How rarely she saw it.

And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.

And then, after a while, she said, 'Christopher, let me hold your hand. Just for once. Just for me. Will you? I won't hold it hard.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex.

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.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

[ ... ] intuition can sometimes get things wrong. And intuition is what people use in life to make decisions.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Then he said, "Christopher, you

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.