Mark Haddon Quotes
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I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
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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.
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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.
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For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
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I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
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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.
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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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As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
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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.
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I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
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I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
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The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
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I think good books have to make a few people angry.
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I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
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My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!
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I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you.