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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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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Making
Legs
Beautiful
Looked
Right
However
Children
Comfortable
Chair
Fiction
Chairs
Writing
Needed
Length
Good
Literature
Height
Like
Four
Genre

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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.
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My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
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...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
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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.
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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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.
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I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
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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.
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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.
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When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
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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...
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On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.
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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.
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Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
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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.
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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.
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There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.
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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
Mark Haddon