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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
Writing
Fiction
Chairs
Good
Needed
Length
Like
Literature
Height
Four
Genre
Making
Legs
Beautiful
Looked
Right
However
Children
Comfortable
Chair

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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
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Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
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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.
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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
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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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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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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I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
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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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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.
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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.
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I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
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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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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.
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..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
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