Top 45 Mark Haddon Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There’s no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

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

When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you’d think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.

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.

It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn’t like film. It’s a bit like when people say they don’t like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.

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

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

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 think good books have to make a few people angry.

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.

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.

What I love about the theatre is that it’s always metaphorical. It’s like going back to being a kid again, and we’re all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there’s a story there.

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.

I think I’ve learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven’t shared their experience in some small way.

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.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

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.

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.

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.

I’ve always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

B is for bestseller.

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.

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.

Many children’s writers don’t have children of their own.

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.