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 started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subj...
La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra.
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you'...
And then a man stood next to the shelf and said, "Come and look at this, Barry. They've got, like, a train elf." And another man came and stood net to him and said, "Well, we have both been drinking." And the first man said, "Perhaps we should feed h...
. Six thousand pounds of muscle powering a hoop of butcher's knives. The only animal that ate its weaker siblings in the womb. Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.
And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.
...most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like, “I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.
I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
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.
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.
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
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 sta...
