Explore Quotes by Mark Haddon

I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.

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.

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

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.

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.

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? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

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.

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

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

I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.