Mark Haddon
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.Collection: Poetry
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.Collection: Imagination
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.
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.
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.
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
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.
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.
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.
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
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.
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
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.
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
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.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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 always thought I'd eventually learn how to draw really well, and despite constant evidence to the contrary, I just kept on trying. If you're too good at anything, you don't have to think about the process, whereas I feel like I spend my life with my head under the bonnet, trying to understand how everything works.
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.
Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
B is for bestseller.
As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
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.
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.
For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
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.
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.
I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
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 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.
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've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
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.
Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
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.
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.