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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.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Wells
Writers
Human
Beings
Humans
Number
Well
Paper
Real
Deal
Really
Deals
Astonished
Good
Numbers
Repeatedly
Life
Understand
Indeed

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.
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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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You love someone, you've got to let something go.
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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Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
Mark Haddon
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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
Mark Haddon
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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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...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
Mark Haddon
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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
Mark Haddon
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Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.
Mark Haddon
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..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.
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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There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
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