If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.

Mark Haddon

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

I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious.

Mark Haddon

War Wit Wants

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

Way Very Tin

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

Mark Haddon

Where Ways Way

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

Age Writer Write

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

Mark Haddon

Work Good Writing

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

Smile Mom Men

I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.

Mark Haddon

Us Up Things

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

Mark Haddon

You Wit Tory

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Mark Haddon

Tan T Side

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

Men Without Wit

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

Mark Haddon

Good You T

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

Men Art Write

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.

Mark Haddon

Chance Your You

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

Mark Haddon

Anger Wit Very

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.

Mark Haddon

Your You Wonderful

No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.

Mark Haddon

Your You Wants

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

Without Wit Via

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

Mark Haddon

Science Will T

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

Work Poetry Wrapping

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

One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.

Mark Haddon

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.

Mark Haddon

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

Mark Haddon

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

Mark Haddon

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

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

I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.

Mark Haddon

It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn't like film. It's a bit like when people say they don't like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.

Mark Haddon

At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

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

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

I'm a writer! If you work in an office, it dampens you. It makes you fit a routine. The effect of being a writer is not dissimilar to being long-term unemployed. And everyone knows that is not good for you.

Mark Haddon

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.

Mark Haddon

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

Mark Haddon

Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.

Mark Haddon

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 roller coaster ride.

Mark Haddon

If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

B is for bestseller.

Mark Haddon

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

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

Mark Haddon