Mark Haddon Quotes
I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.
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.
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.
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.
I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end
I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.
And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.
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.
I went to boarding school and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating
You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.
Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.
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.
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.
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
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
Lots of things are mystries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.
Water purling between the rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind.
She is off the heart's map and her compass is spinning.
It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.
Also I didn't habe 20/20 vision whch you needed to be a pilot. But I said you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
...because I went to London on my own, and because I went to solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary
people believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance.
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.
And intuition is what people is what people use in life to make decisions.But logic can help you work out the right answer.
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.