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I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
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More quotes by 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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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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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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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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And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.
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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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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...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
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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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
Mark Haddon
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..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
Mark Haddon
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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Mark Haddon
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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
Mark Haddon
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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
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've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
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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... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
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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What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.
Mark Haddon