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Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Speak
Relativity
Difficulties
French
Difficulty
Learning
Understanding
Everyone
Difficult

More quotes by Mark Haddon

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I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
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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I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
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.
Mark Haddon
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I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon
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I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.
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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..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
Mark Haddon
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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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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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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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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
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And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
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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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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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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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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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.
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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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