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

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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.
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It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.
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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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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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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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I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
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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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Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life.
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And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.
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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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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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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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
Mark Haddon
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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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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.
Mark Haddon
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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
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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.
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Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
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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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The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
Mark Haddon