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
artist dinner rest-of-your-life
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.
clever mind literature
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.
home long television
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.
religious atheist hymns
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.
eye lazy too-late
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
travel writing thinking
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
memories swimming past
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.
writing oddities people
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.
bills tricks remarkable
I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.
zoos believe thinking
...people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.
cities oxford space
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.
children book risk
The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
children book thinking
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.
dog stories forks
I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.