Quote

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: 61
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Like
Literature
Height
Four
Genre
Making
Legs
Beautiful
Looked
Right
However
Children
Comfortable
Chair
Writing
Fiction
Chairs
Good
Needed
Length

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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.
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You love someone, you've got to let something go.
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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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...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
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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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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.
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Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
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Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
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... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
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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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I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
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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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I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
Mark Haddon