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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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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Children
Complex
Writing
Adults
Therefore
Respect
Accorded
Books
Counterparts
Literature
Bloody
Difficult
Adult
Book
Complexes

More quotes by 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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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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You love someone, you've got to let something go.
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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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
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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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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How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
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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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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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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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 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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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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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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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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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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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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