Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Haddon
Age: 61
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Literature
Thought
Book
Children
Illustrate
Writing
Innocence
Easier
Started
Books

More quotes by Mark Haddon

Image
..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
Image
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
Mark Haddon
Image
I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Mark Haddon
Image
How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
Mark Haddon
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
Mark Haddon
Image
... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
Mark Haddon
Image
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
Mark Haddon
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
Mark Haddon
Image
...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
Mark Haddon
Image
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
... 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