Quote

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

Mark Haddon

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Born
Trains
Never
Astronaut
Steam
Lazy
Meant
Train
Late
Eye

More quotes by Mark Haddon

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
Mark Haddon
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
Mark Haddon
Image
Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
Mark Haddon
Image
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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
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? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
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
How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
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
There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.
Mark Haddon
Image
Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
Mark Haddon
Image
...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
Mark Haddon