Mark Haddon Quotes

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

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.

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.

On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

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.

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

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

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.

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

Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.

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

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

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

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.

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 state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

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

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.

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.

I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else

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.

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? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

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.

People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves.

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 looking back, and quite a nice one.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

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.

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

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.

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 bit of a roller coaster ride...

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

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

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 wonderful.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

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

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything

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

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.