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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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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
High
Phrase
Term
Humour
Though
Phrases
Perfect
Terms
Bedfellows
Without
Usually
Trivial
Think
Darkness
Rapidly
Thinking
Becomes
Seriousness
Comedy
Unbearable

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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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Use your imagination and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.
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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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...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
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Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
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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.
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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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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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... 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.
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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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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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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.
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I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
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.
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... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
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I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
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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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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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For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
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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