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A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Give
Involvement
Without
Plot
Giving
Dull
Real
Pity
Patronising
Way
Drama
Kudos
People
Roles
Wheeled
Quite
Disabilities
Used
Disability

More quotes by Mark Haddon

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The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
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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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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.
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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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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.
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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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.
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You love someone, you've got to let something go.
Mark Haddon
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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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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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
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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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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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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.
Mark Haddon
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I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
Mark Haddon