Mark Haddon Quotes - Page 3

I find people confusing.

You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.

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.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

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.

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.

Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.

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.

I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.

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.

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane.

I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.

I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.

And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

Many childrens writers dont have children of their own

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.

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.