Mark Haddon famous quotes

It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.
-- Mark Haddon

#Believe #Evil #World

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

#Thinking #Two #Giving

He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.
-- Mark Haddon

#Uncles #Thinking #People

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.
-- Mark Haddon

#Dog #Lying #Thinking

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

#Rain #Sunday #White

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
-- Mark Haddon

#Children #Book #Sunday

Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.
-- Mark Haddon

#Sad #People #Secret

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

#Light #Interesting #People

Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
-- Mark Haddon

#Understanding #Speak #Difficult

I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else
-- Mark Haddon

#Father #Two #White

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.
-- Mark Haddon

#Children #Honesty #Stupid

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

#Thinking #Literature #Stuff

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
-- Mark Haddon

#Book #Reading #Literature

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.
-- Mark Haddon

#Believe #Moving #Thinking

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
-- Mark Haddon

#Mean #Two #Fiction

And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon 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

#Stars #Moving #Fall

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

#Book #Writing #Ideas

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

#Children #Book #Writing

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

#Taken #Math #Thinking

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
-- Mark Haddon

#Stupid #People #Want

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
-- Mark Haddon

#Writing #Secret #Good Writing

But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
-- Mark Haddon

#Want #Said #Unlikely

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

#Book #Taken #Darkness

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
-- Mark Haddon

#Running #People #Literature

At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.
-- Mark Haddon

#Love #Giving Up #Teenage

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

#Giving #Poetry Is #Wrapping

..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

#Stars #Fall #Night

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,
-- Mark Haddon

#Writing #Today #Stories

..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
-- Mark Haddon

#Stones #Sticks #Bones

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

#Real #People #Film

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
-- Mark Haddon

#People #Madness

I find people confusing.
-- Mark Haddon

#People #Confusing

And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared.
-- Mark Haddon

#Life #Dark #Moon

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.
-- Mark Haddon

#Life #Thinking #France

Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.
-- Mark Haddon

#Thinking #Talking #Mirrors

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

#Literature #Becoming #Caught

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.
-- Mark Haddon

#Stars #Nice #Taken

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

#Years #Two #Three

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
-- Mark Haddon

#Nice #Home #Class

And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?" And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me.
-- Mark Haddon

#Father #Love You #Mean

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
-- Mark Haddon

#Mean #Answers #Mystery

Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
-- Mark Haddon

#Children

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

#Moving #Kids #Theatre

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
-- Mark Haddon

#Children #Writing #Fiction

Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.
-- Mark Haddon

#Fall #People #Half

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
-- Mark Haddon

#Book #Kids #Imperfection

I want my name to mean me.
-- Mark Haddon

#Mean #Names #Want

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.
-- Mark Haddon

#Prayer #Believe #Fall

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

#Math #Answers #Ends

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

#Book #Differences #World

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

#World #Another World

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
-- Mark Haddon

#Eye

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

#Father #Distance #Fall

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
-- Mark Haddon

#Country #Writing #America

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
-- Mark Haddon

#Giving #Literature #Able

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
-- Mark Haddon

#Perspective #Ordinary #Extraordinary

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

#Book #Writing #Shoes

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
-- Mark Haddon

#Stars #Sky #Sailing

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.
-- Mark Haddon

#Hurt #Feelings #Hug

... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
-- Mark Haddon

#Lost #Timetables

I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.
-- Mark Haddon

#People #Stranger #Mets

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.
-- Mark Haddon

#Mean #Smell #People

What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing exept his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.
-- Mark Haddon

#Flower #Garden #Years

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.
-- Mark Haddon

#Stars #Garden #Sky

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

#Hate #Decision #Reason

And this shows that people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Which is Latin and it means: No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary. Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone who is dead.
-- Mark Haddon

#Latin #Stupid #Mean

But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.
-- Mark Haddon

#Mother #Real #Stupid

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
-- Mark Haddon

#Book #Writing #Done

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.
-- Mark Haddon

#Secret #Contentment

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.
-- Mark Haddon

#Distance #Book #Hard Work

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
-- Mark Haddon

#Clever #Work Out #Something New