Mark Haddon Quotes & Sayings

I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you. — Mark Haddon

Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you just said before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds. — Mark Haddon

And maybe Bob-with-the-Hawaiian-shirt was right. Maybe it was cool being on a planet on the far side of the known galaxy. And maybe it was even cooler escaping and getting home again. But the coolest thing of all was having my best friend back. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

This is how we leave the world,
with the heart weeping,
and the hope that distance
brings the solving wonder
of one last clear view
before that long sleep
about the weather's changes — Mark Haddon

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk. — Mark Haddon

Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them. — Mark Haddon

Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating — Mark Haddon

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

Metaphors are lies. — Mark Haddon

To be honest, I'm trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life. — Mark Haddon

What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older. You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone's feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people's shit. At nine or ninety. — Mark Haddon

I like poetry when I don't quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn't just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn't work like that. — Mark Haddon

And I said, "I needed to sit down and be quiet and think." And he said, "OK, let's keep it simple. What are you doing at the railway station?" And I said, "I'm going to see Mother." And he said, "Mother? — Mark Haddon

He had dreadlocks, which is what some black people have, but he was white, and dreadlocks is when you never wash your hair and it looks like old rope. — Mark Haddon

He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn't remember the last time someone had done that. He — Mark Haddon

Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did. — Mark Haddon

He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people's at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn't have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you. — Mark Haddon

It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke. — Mark Haddon

I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious. — Mark Haddon

Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don't know how to deal with them in real life. — Mark Haddon

Even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to forget to stand up straight and hang on to the rail and I'm going to fall over and be killed. — Mark Haddon

Life is a cowpat sandwich Jimbo.' he sighed 'with a very thin bread and lots of filling. — Mark Haddon

He is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made. — Mark Haddon

Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feeling are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happened, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry. — Mark Haddon

How do you remember this stuff? But why had she forgotten? That was the real question. — Mark Haddon

She cannot remember her mother's face ... This is the woman who brought her into the world ... This is the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind's eye in her mother's direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders ... She begins to realise how alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white space between the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

Loving someone is helping them when they get in trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth ... — Mark Haddon

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don't even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something. — Mark Haddon

Mrs. Forbes said that hating yellow and borwn is just being silly. And Siobhan said that she shouldn't say things like that and everyone has favorite colors. And Siobhan was right. But Mrs. Forbes was a bit right, too. Because it is sort of being silly. 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. It is like being in a restaurant like when Father takes me out to a Berni Inn sometimes and you look at the menu and you have to choose what you are going to have. But you don't know if you are going to like something because you haven't tasted it yet, so you have favorite foods and you choose these, and you have foods you dno't like and you don't choose these, and then it is simple. — Mark Haddon

Words (which means from one place to another) and (which — Mark Haddon

Prime numbers is what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. — Mark Haddon

He was an arsehole, but, God, she looked at Richard sometimes, the racing bike, the way he did the crossword in pencil first. There were evenings when she wanted Dad to ride in off the plains, all dust and sweat and tumbleweed, kick open the saloon doors and stick some bullet holes in those fucking art books. — Mark Haddon

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

People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves. — Mark Haddon

I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe. — Mark Haddon

Strange to discover that describing his fears out loud was less frightening than trying not to think about them. Something about seeing your enemy out in the open. The — Mark Haddon

What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film. — Mark Haddon

It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silcence but not empty. — Mark Haddon

And people who believe in God think God has put human beings on the 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. — Mark Haddon

He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home. An — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

I used to have dreams that everything would get better. Do you remember, you used to say that you wanted to be an astranaut? Well, I used to have dreams where you were an astranaut and you were on the television and I thought that's my son. — Mark Haddon

There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one. — Mark Haddon

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

We had a lot of argumants like that. Because I often thought I couldn't take any more. And your father is really pacient but I'm not, I get cross, even though I don't mean too. And by the end we stopped talking to each other very much because we knew it would always end up in an argumant and it would go nowere, And I felt realy lonley. — Mark Haddon

But she wasn't really listening, because underneath it all ran the fear that it had nothing to do with good fortune, that he had earned this, and she resented him because she could have done it, too, if she'd applied herself properly, become a lawyer, moved to Canada, run a business, and what she saw when she looked at Richard was not his success but her own failure. — Mark Haddon

But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid. — Mark Haddon

Miaow

Consider me.
I sit here like Tiberius,
inscrutable and grand.
I will let "I dare not"
wait upon "I would"
and bear the twangling
of your small guitar
because you are my owl
and foster me with milk.
Why wet my paw?
Just keep me in a bag
and no one knows the truth.
I am familiar with witches
and stand a better chance in hell than you
for I can dance on hot bricks,
leap your height
and land on all fours.
I am the servant of the Living God.
I worship in my way.
Look into these slit green stones
and follow your reflected lights
into the dark.

Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.
You don't play with me.
I play with you. — Mark Haddon

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

Water purling between the rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind. — Mark Haddon

Some people think the Milky Way is a long line of stars, but it isn't. Our galaxy is a huge disk of stars millions of light-years across, and the solar system is somewhere near the outside edge of the disk. — Mark Haddon

And something happened in Katie's heart, and she realized it wasn't just two people being joined together, not even two families. She felt as if she were joining hands with everyone who'd done this before her, just as she'd done after giving birth to Jacob, a feeling that she finally belonged, that she was part of the whole enterprise, a brick in that great arch which rose out of the dark behind you and swung over your head and curved into the future, and she was helping to keep it strong and solid, and helping to protect everyone beneath it. — Mark Haddon

And intuition is what people is what people use in life to make decisions.But logic can help you work out the right answer. — Mark Haddon

.. a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile. — Mark Haddon

She watched the children the way a snake might watch a cat. — Mark Haddon

Why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time. — Mark Haddon

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

She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog. — Mark Haddon

And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug of a computer out of the wall if it crashes, because I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and hurt. — Mark Haddon

That was what it meant, didn't it. Being good. You didn't have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn't have to give away your coffee table. You just had to see things from other people's point of view. Remember they were human. — Mark Haddon

All those other lives. You never did get to lead them. — Mark Haddon

Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone. — Mark Haddon

[ ... ] intuition can sometimes get things wrong. And intuition is what people use in life to make decisions. — Mark Haddon

With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

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

Like when you wake up at night, and the only sounds you hear are the sounds inside your head. — Mark Haddon

I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people. — Mark Haddon

I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end — Mark Haddon

And I remember looking at the two of you and seeing you together and thinking how you were really differant with him. Much calmer. And you didn't shout at one another. And it made me so sad because it was like you didn't really need me at all. And somehow that was even worse than you and me arguing all the time because it was like I was invisible.
And I think that was when I realised you and your father were probably better off if I wasn't living in the house. — Mark Haddon

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person. — Mark Haddon

Companionship refused is worse than loneliness. — Mark Haddon

I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one. — Mark Haddon

Also had a very hairy nose. It looked as if there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils.1 — Mark Haddon

The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzetti's dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel. (pg 53) — Mark Haddon

Most men wanted to tell you what they knew. The route to Wisbech. How to get a log fire going. David made her feel she was the one who knew things. He — Mark Haddon

After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed. — Mark Haddon

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable. — Mark Haddon

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real. — Mark Haddon

He had always seen his self-sufficiency as an admirable quality, a way of not imposing upon other people, but he could see now that it was an insult to those close to you. — Mark Haddon

But sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes we are sad but we don't really know we are sad. So we say we aren't sad. But really we are. — Mark Haddon

If he wasn't careful he'd turn into one of those men who cared more about furniture than human beings. He'd end up living with someone else who cared more about furniture than human beings and they'd lead a life which looked perfectly normal from the outside but was, in truth, a kind of living death that left your heart looking like a raisin. Or — Mark Haddon

It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn't like film. It's a bit like when people say they don't like books: you get that sharp intake of breath. — Mark Haddon

Christopher explains that he ranks the day according to the number and color of the cars he sees on his way to school. Three red cars in a row equal a Good Day, and five equal a Super Good Day. Four yellow cars in a row make it a Black Day. On Black Days Christopher refuses to speak to anyone and sits by himself at lunch. — Mark Haddon

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. — Mark Haddon

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way. — Mark Haddon

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. — Mark Haddon

I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine horror. — Mark Haddon

Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince. — Mark Haddon

And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought. — Mark Haddon

It was like pressing your thumbnail against a radiator when it's really hot and the pain starts and it makes you want to cry and the pain keeps hurting even when you take your thumb away from the radiator. — Mark Haddon

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

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary. — Mark Haddon