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When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.

Mark Haddon

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Mark Haddon
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: October 28
Illustrator
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Started
Devouring
Quite
Mathematician
Novels
Literature
Caught
Take
Save
Time
Took
Becoming
Novel

More quotes by Mark Haddon

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Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
Mark Haddon
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I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
Mark Haddon
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I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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You love someone, you've got to let something go.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
Mark Haddon
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Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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.
Mark Haddon
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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