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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
Though
Phrases
Perfect
Terms
Bedfellows
Without
Usually
Trivial
Think
Darkness
Rapidly
Thinking
Becomes
Seriousness
Comedy
Unbearable
High
Phrase
Term
Humour

More quotes by Mark Haddon

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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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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
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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.
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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.
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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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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
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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.
Mark Haddon
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Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
Mark Haddon
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I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.
Mark Haddon
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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
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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.
Mark Haddon
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I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a bit of a roller coaster ride...
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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
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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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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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