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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Mark Haddon

Image
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
You love someone, you've got to let something go.
Mark Haddon
Image
..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
Mark Haddon
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.
Mark Haddon
Image
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.
Mark Haddon
Image
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
Mark Haddon
Image
Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
Mark Haddon
Image
Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.
Mark Haddon
Image
The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
Mark Haddon
Image
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
Image
And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
Mark Haddon
Image
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