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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Many
Things
Ignoring
Contentment
Lays
Completely
Secret

More quotes by 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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I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
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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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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... 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.
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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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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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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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.
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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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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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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You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
Mark Haddon
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It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.
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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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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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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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.
Mark Haddon
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..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon