Top 100 Mark Haddon Quotes
#1. 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.
Mark Haddon
#2. I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon
#3. But you shoutet and you knocked those mixers off the shelf and there was a big crash.
Mark Haddon
#4. Like when you wake up at night, and the only sounds you hear are the sounds inside your head.
Mark Haddon
#5. 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.
Mark Haddon
#6. How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
Mark Haddon
#7. Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.
Mark Haddon
#8. He held up his right hand and spread my fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other.
Mark Haddon
#9. 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.
Mark Haddon
#10. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.
Mark Haddon
#11. 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.
Mark Haddon
#12. Her only worry sometimes was that she didn't look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She'd see a girl in patterned Doc Martens or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls.
Mark Haddon
#14. quod erat demonstrandum, which is Latin for which is the thing that was going to be proved, which means thus it is proved.
Mark Haddon
#15. Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
Mark Haddon
#16. Strange to discover that describing his fears out loud was less frightening than trying not to think about them. Something about seeing your enemy out in the open. The
Mark Haddon
#17. I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Mark Haddon
#18. A smile is not a lie, unless it is a bad smile
Mark Haddon
#19. Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
#20. And one of the friends died of fear that very nice and the other two were broken men for the rest of their lives.
Mark Haddon
#21. I said that I wasn't clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn't clever. That was just being observant.
Mark Haddon
#22. It was like pressing your thumbnail against a radiator when it's really hot and the pain starts and it makes you want to cry and the pain keeps hurting even when you take your thumb away from the radiator.
Mark Haddon
#23. Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible.
Mark Haddon
#24. 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.
Mark Haddon
#25. The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
Mark Haddon
#26. How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.
Mark Haddon
#27. I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.
Mark Haddon
#28. And because there is something they can't see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can't see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they're scared.
Mark Haddon
#29. It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.
Mark Haddon
#30. It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.
Mark Haddon
#31. And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery ... and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
Mark Haddon
#32. Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,
Mark Haddon
#33. But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have a Swiss Army knife if they hit me.
Mark Haddon
#34. You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
Mark Haddon
#35. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.
Mark Haddon
#36. You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Mark Haddon
#38. Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Mark Haddon
#39. I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
Mark Haddon
#40. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silcence but not empty.
Mark Haddon
#41. You love someone, you've got to let something go.
Mark Haddon
#42. And then, after a while, she said, 'Christopher, let me hold your hand. Just for once. Just for me. Will you? I won't hold it hard.
Mark Haddon
#43. The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'
Mark Haddon
#44. 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.
Mark Haddon
#45. I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
Mark Haddon
#46. 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.
Mark Haddon
#47. She can feel it all, centuries of habitation, paint over paint over plaster over stone.
Mark Haddon
#48. 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
#49. And there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
Mark Haddon
#50. To be honest, I'm trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.
Mark Haddon
#51. I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that's not so stupid, looking back ... maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings.
Mark Haddon
#53. Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.
Mark Haddon
#54. I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
Mark Haddon
#55. 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!
Mark Haddon
#56. He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
Mark Haddon
#57. 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
#58. And outside the window was like a map, except it was in 3 dimensions and it was life-size because it was the thing it was a map of.
Mark Haddon
#59. He had never spoken to Uncle Richard, but he knew that he was a radiologist who put tubes into people's groins and pushed them up into their brains to clear blockages like chimney sweeps did and this was a glorious idea.
Mark Haddon
#60. And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
Mark Haddon
#61. I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Mark Haddon
#62. And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end
Mark Haddon
#63. I find people confusing.
this is for 2 main reasons.
Mark Haddon
#64. He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your hair and it looks like old rope.
Mark Haddon
#65. Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
Mark Haddon
#66. Maybe it wasn't God after all, maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.
Mark Haddon
#67. And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.
Mark Haddon
#68. Because adults forgot how porous that border was, the ease with which you could summon monsters and find treasure in any basement. Besides, adults talked to themselves. Was that any more rational?
Mark Haddon
#69. The police asked us whether we wanted counselling. We said we'd prefer a hot supper.
Mark Haddon
#70. He smelled of something I do not know the name of which Father often smells of when he comes home from work.
Mark Haddon
#71. 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
#73. 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.
Mark Haddon
#74. After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.
Mark Haddon
#75. That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds.
Mark Haddon
#76. For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
Mark Haddon
#77. The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
Mark Haddon
#78. 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
#79. I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
Mark Haddon
#80. All those other lives. You never did get to lead them.
Mark Haddon
#81. Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance.
Mark Haddon
#82. Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.
Mark Haddon
#83. The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
Mark Haddon
#84. She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog.
Mark Haddon
#85. Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's ... if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder,
Mark Haddon
#86. 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
#87. .. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.
Mark Haddon
#88. Time is only the relationship between the different things changing
Mark Haddon
#89. That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.
Mark Haddon
#90. He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot.
Mark Haddon
#91. And I saw a man- go up to one of the doors of the train and press a big button next to it and the doors were electric and they slid open and I liked that.
Mark Haddon
#92. 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.
Mark Haddon
#93. He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home. An
Mark Haddon
#94. 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.
Mark Haddon
#95. I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.
Mark Haddon
#96. Prime numbers is what is left when you have taken all the patterns away.
Mark Haddon
#97. [I]t is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.
Mark Haddon
#98. For example, people often say "Be quiet," but they don't tell you how long to be quiet for. Or you see a sign which says KEEP OFF THE GRASS but it should say KEEP OFF THE GRASS AROUND THIS SIGN or KEEP OFF ALL THE GRASS IN THIS PARK because there is lots of grass you are allowed to walk on.
Mark Haddon
#99. People think computers are different from people because they don't have minds, even though, in the Turing test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell jokes.
Mark Haddon
#100. You look around and it occurs to you that this isn't real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn't matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can't remember where the present is and how to get back there.
Mark Haddon
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top