Top 100 Mark Haddon Quotes
#1. I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out.
Arthur Golden
#2. 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
#3. Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.
Mark Haddon
#4. I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon
#5. Most people are almost blind and they don't see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren't connected and are silly, like, I'm worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.
Mark Haddon
#6. Loving someone is helping them when they get in trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth ...
Mark Haddon
#7. Words (which means from one place to another) and (which
Mark Haddon
#8. Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life.
Mark Haddon
#9. Lord alone knows." George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. "The mystery of one's children is never-ending.
Mark Haddon
#10. 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
#11. He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn't remember the last time someone had done that. He
Mark Haddon
#12. 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.
Mark Haddon
#13. But you shoutet and you knocked those mixers off the shelf and there was a big crash.
Mark Haddon
#14. His mother had hated him for looking after her, then hated him for leaving. Five years living with an alcoholic woman and no one had thanked him. If there was such a thing as the moral high ground it was surely he who occupied it.
Mark Haddon
#15. 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.
Mark Haddon
#16. No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.
Mark Haddon
#17. Satan will make many a fierce attack on your perseverance; it will be the mark for all his arrows.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#19. Like when you wake up at night, and the only sounds you hear are the sounds inside your head.
Mark Haddon
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
Mark Haddon
#23. Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
Mark Haddon
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. This is how we leave the world,
with the heart weeping,
and the hope that distance
brings the solving wonder
of one last clear view
before that long sleep
about the weather's changes
Mark Haddon
#28. 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
#29. But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
Mark Haddon
#30. He had always seen his self-sufficiency as an admirable quality, a way of not imposing upon other people, but he could see now that it was an insult to those close to you.
Mark Haddon
#31. Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
Mark Haddon
#32. And I said, "I needed to sit down and be quiet and think." And he said, "OK, let's keep it simple. What are you doing at the railway station?" And I said, "I'm going to see Mother." And he said, "Mother?
Mark Haddon
#33. I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.
Mark Haddon
#34. 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
#35. 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.
Mark Haddon
#36. 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
#37. 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.
Mark Haddon
#38. He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex.
Mark Haddon
#39. I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.
Mark Haddon
#40. [ ... ] intuition can sometimes get things wrong. And intuition is what people use in life to make decisions.
Mark Haddon
#41. He said, 'are you telling the truth?'
I said, 'Yes. I always tell the truth.
Mark Haddon
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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.
Mark Haddon
#45. 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
#46. I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.
Mark Haddon
#48. 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.
Mark Haddon
#49. And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing.
Mark Haddon
#50. 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
#51. Reading is primarily a symptom. Of a healthy imagination, of our interest in this and other worlds, of our ability to be still and quiet, of our ability to dream during daylight.
Mark Haddon
#52. I wondered whether Mrs. Shears had told the police that I had killed Wellington and whether, when the police found out that she had lied, she would go to prison. Because telling lies about people is called slander.
Mark Haddon
#53. Mark that the blessings of sacred fellowship and perfect cleansing are bound up with walking in the light.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#54. Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
Mark Haddon
#55. Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
Mark Haddon
#56. 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
#57. I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Mark Haddon
#58. 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.
Mark Haddon
#59. A smile is not a lie, unless it is a bad smile
Mark Haddon
#60. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.
Mark Haddon
#61. 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.
Mark Haddon
#62. Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
#63. He had always thought of solitary diners as sad. But now that he was the solitary diner, he felt rather superior. On account of the book, mostly. Learning something while everyone else was wasting time. Like working at night.
Mark Haddon
#64. ..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
Mark Haddon
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I'm a writer! If you work in an office, it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you.
Mark Haddon
#68. And maybe Bob-with-the-Hawaiian-shirt was right. Maybe it was cool being on a planet on the far side of the known galaxy. And maybe it was even cooler escaping and getting home again. But the coolest thing of all was having my best friend back.
Mark Haddon
#69. 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
#70. I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.
Mark Haddon
#71. 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
#72. Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible.
Mark Haddon
#73. 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
#75. 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.
Mark Haddon
#76. I used to have dreams that everything would get better. Do you remember, you used to say that you wanted to be an astranaut? Well, I used to have dreams where you were an astranaut and you were on the television and I thought that's my son.
Mark Haddon
#77. 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
#78. 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.
Mark Haddon
#79. Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.
Mark Haddon
#80. That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn't be washed off.
Mark Haddon
#81. How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.
Mark Haddon
#82. People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark.
Mark Haddon
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did.
Mark Haddon
#87. 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.
Mark Haddon
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Zeal for the glory of King Jesus was the seal and mark of all genuine Christians. Because of their dependence upon Christ's love they dared much, and because of their love to Christ they did much, and it is the same now.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#91. 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
#92. Sit still long enough
and everything will come to you.
Mark Haddon
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.
Mark Haddon
#96. So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real.
Mark Haddon
#97. Ray was disappointed by the (Millenium) wheel. Too well engineered, he said. He wanted the wind in his hair and a rusty handrail and the faint pssibility that the whole structure might collapse.
Mark Haddon
#98. Think about today. Think about things that have happened. Especially about good things that have happened.
Mark Haddon
#99. He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.
Mark Haddon
#100. That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Mark Haddon
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
