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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer. Mark Haddon Read Quote
As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
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. Mark Haddon Read Quote
