Mark Haddon Quotes
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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 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.
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That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.
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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.
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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.
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Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them.
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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.
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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.
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If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.
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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.
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I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
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If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
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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.
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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.
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Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
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My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
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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.
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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.
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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.