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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Filled
Childhood
Happen
Happy
Happens
Children
Even
Appalling
Things
Sadness

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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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I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
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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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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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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.
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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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There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
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Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
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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.
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...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
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Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
Mark Haddon
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Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.
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Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
Mark Haddon
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..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
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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