Author details
All Mark Haddon Quotes
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.
Mark Haddon
85% of people like this quote
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
64% of people like this quote
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.
Mark Haddon
59% of people like this quote
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
Mark Haddon
57% of people like this quote
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Mark Haddon
56% of people like this quote
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
56% of people like this quote
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon
56% of people like this quote
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
56% of people like this quote
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
Mark Haddon
55% of people like this quote
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
Mark Haddon
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
54% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
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
53% of people like this quote
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
Mark Haddon
53% of people like this quote
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