Mark Haddon Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Believe #Evil #World

“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

#Thinking #Two #Giving

“He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Uncles #Thinking #People

“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

#Dog #Lying #Thinking

“On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Rain #Sunday #White

“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

#Children #Book #Sunday

“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 really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Sad #People #Secret

“For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Light #Interesting #People

“Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Understanding #Speak #Difficult

“I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else”
-- Mark Haddon

#Father #Two #White

“All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Children #Honesty #Stupid

“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

#Thinking #Literature #Stuff

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

#Book #Reading #Literature

“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.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Believe #Moving #Thinking

“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

#Mean #Two #Fiction

“And when the universe has finished exploding all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon 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.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Stars #Moving #Fall

“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.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Book #Writing #Ideas

“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

#Children #Book #Writing

“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.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Taken #Math #Thinking

“And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Stupid #People #Want

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

#Writing #Secret #Good Writing

“But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Want #Said #Unlikely

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

#Book #Taken #Darkness

“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

#Running #People #Literature

“At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Love #Giving Up #Teenage

“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

#Giving #Poetry Is #Wrapping

“..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.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Stars #Fall #Night

“Well, we're meant to be writing stories today,”
-- Mark Haddon

#Writing #Today #Stories

“..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.”
-- Mark Haddon

#Stones #Sticks #Bones

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

#Real #People #Film