Mark Haddon Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
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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.
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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
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I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
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Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
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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.