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.
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 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 sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather w...
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 all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.
There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to ...
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
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.
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.
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'
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.
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.
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.
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.
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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. But not necessarily a waste of effort.
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 t...
No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.
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.
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
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 knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
