Quotes by Mark Haddon

About Mark Haddon:

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for that work.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

...companionship refused is worse than loneliness.

Mark Haddon

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 mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.

Mark Haddon

It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.

Mark Haddon

That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.

Mark Haddon

After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.

Mark Haddon

Miaow Consider me. I sit here like Tiberius, inscrutable and grand. I will let "I dare not" wait upon "I would" and bear the twangling of your small guitar because you are my owl and foster me with milk. Why wet my paw? Just keep me in a bag and no o...

Mark Haddon

A Rough Guide Be polite at the reception desk. Not all the knives are in the museum. The waitresses know that a nice boy is formed in the same way as a deckchair. Pay for the beer and send flowers. Introduce yourself as Richard. Do not refer to what ...

Mark Haddon

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!

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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 all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

Mark Haddon

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.

Mark Haddon

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

Mark Haddon

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

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 to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.

Mark Haddon

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Mark Haddon

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 to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

Mark Haddon

I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious.

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 and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.

Mark Haddon

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. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.

Mark Haddon

Author Bio

  • NameMark Haddon
  • DescriptionEnglish writer and illustrator
  • BornSeptember 26, 1962
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Screenwriter
  • AwardsCosta Book Awards