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

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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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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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Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.
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Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
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..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
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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.
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How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
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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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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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Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
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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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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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I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.
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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.
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...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt.
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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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...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything
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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.
Mark Haddon
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... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
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The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
Mark Haddon