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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

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Lives
Screen
Book
Screens
Many
Limited
Writing
Boring
People
Seen
Books
Austen
Literature
Desperately
Forget
Jane

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I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
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And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
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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.
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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.
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But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.
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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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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.
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I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
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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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Writing for children is bloody difficult books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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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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You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
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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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And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.
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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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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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My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
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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.
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