Mark Haddon quotes - page 3

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, poet, and screenwriter, best known for his novel "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time." His works often explore themes of disability, family, and perception. He is acclaimed for his unique narrative style and insightful portrayal of characters. Here are 111 of his quotes:

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

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

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

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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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.

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

Siobhan says that if you raise one eyebrow it can means lots of different things. It can mean 'I want to do sex with you' and it can also mean 'I think what you just said was very stupid.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

Mark Haddon

Sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army Knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self defense and I won't go to prison.

Mark Haddon

Metaphors are lies.

Mark Haddon