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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
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Understand
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More quotes by 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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Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.
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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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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Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
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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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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Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
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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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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Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.
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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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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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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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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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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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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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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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
Mark Haddon