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.
- Mark Haddon 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 Quote

Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
- Mark Haddon Quote

From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
- Mark Haddon Quote

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.
- Mark Haddon Quote

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
- Mark Haddon Quote

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
- Mark Haddon Quote

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
- Mark Haddon Quote

I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
- Mark Haddon Quote

I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
- Mark Haddon Quote

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.
- Mark Haddon Quote

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
- Mark Haddon Quote

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
- Mark Haddon 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 Quote

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
- Mark Haddon Quote

Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
- Mark Haddon Quote

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
- Mark Haddon Quote

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.
- Mark Haddon Quote

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
- Mark Haddon Quote

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
- Mark Haddon Quote

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
- Mark Haddon Quote

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
- Mark Haddon Quote

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.
- Mark Haddon Quote

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.
- Mark Haddon Quote