Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddonis an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 September 1962
father two white
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else
writing secret good-writing
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
children book writing
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.
stupid people want
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
character thinking way
I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
character thinking people
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.
passenger-seat love-someone
You love someone, you've got to let something go.
stars sky sailing
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
eye
How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.
children writing fiction
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.
years two three
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
math answers ends
And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end
country wrestling somewhere-else
At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.
literature becoming caught
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.