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

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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

Mark Haddon

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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 m...

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.

Mark Haddon

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...

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

Author Bio

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