Madness doesn’t happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can’t really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it’s a reaction to genuine horror. Mark Haddon Read Quote
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
I’ve come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can’t describe. Mark Haddon Read Quote
I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You’d swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
