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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
Secret
Many
Things
Ignoring
Contentment
Lays
Completely

More quotes by Mark Haddon

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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Mark Haddon
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When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
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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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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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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...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
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 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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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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..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 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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And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
Mark Haddon
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My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
Mark Haddon
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Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
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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Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
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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A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.
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
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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
Mark Haddon