Mark Haddon Quotes
35 Mark Haddon quotes:
"As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country."
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"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."
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"B is for bestseller."
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"From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness."
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"I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut."
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"If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance."
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"Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well."
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"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."
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"Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person."
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"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."
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"Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene."
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"For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people."
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"I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride."
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"I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting."
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"I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad."
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