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Mark Haddon Biography

Mark Haddon (born 28 October 1962) is an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003). He won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work.

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Mark Haddon Quotes

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

Book, Books, Fiction, Kid, Kids, Science

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

Left, Like, Math, Taken, Thinking, Work

But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don't take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.

Decision, Hate, Life, Reason Why, Spend

And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.

Buildings, Click, Distance, Fall, Father, Street

Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Extraordinary, Ordinary, Perspective

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.

Book, Writing, People, Screen, Boring

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another. . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

Confuses, Describe, Eye, Lying, Mean, Skeletons

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

Everyone, Sailing, Sky, Stars, Wandering, Word

. . because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.

Billions, Blazing, Fall, Falling, Night, Stars

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.

Care, Enough, Humdrum, Imagination, See, Use

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.

Drama, Dull, Patronising, People, Real

Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.

Committed, Day, Fact, Facts, Murder, Victim

I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.

Believe, Like, Moving, Think, Thinking

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

Book, Idea, Ideas, Photographs, Picture, Writing

Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.

Became, Dying, Girl, Imagine, Mind

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

Crossing, Good Writing, Secret, Work, Writing

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

Book, Breathtakingly, Children, Five, Latter

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.

Bookshops, Cities, Cultural, Oxford, Space, Terms

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, Escape, Fiction, Jobs, Part

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.

Book, Children, Difficult, Risk, Teeth

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Mark Haddon Biography

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