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At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Children
Begin
Realising
Possibility
Literary
Fiction
Fewer
Literature
Speaks
Getting
Possibilities
Jobs
Partners
Speak
Escape
Debts
Part
Debt
Realise

More quotes by Mark Haddon

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
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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.
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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.
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I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
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Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
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Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
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Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.
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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.
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Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
Mark Haddon
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My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
Mark Haddon
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And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
Mark Haddon
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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
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..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.
Mark Haddon
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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