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
I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don’t have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn’t get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They’d be a garage mechanic or something. – Mark Haddon
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. – Mark Haddon
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. – Mark Haddon
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer. – 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
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
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
Humour and high seriousness… Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable. – Mark Haddon
If you’re trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it’s the graveyard of people whose books haven’t been wanted. – Mark Haddon
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
As to the number of novels I’ve abandoned… I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that’s a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort. – Mark Haddon
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. – Mark Haddon
If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you’d think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children. – Mark Haddon
I am really interested in eccentric minds. It’s rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It’s really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up. – 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
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