102+ Mark Haddon Quotes On Education, Identity And Religion

Mark Haddon is an English novelist and poet. He is best known for his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year award. He has also written several other novels, as well as plays, short stories, and poetry. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Mark Haddon on education, identity, religion.

Top 10 Mark Haddon Quotes

1. Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
2. I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.
8. You love someone, you've got to let something go.
9. No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• ... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
• ..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
• Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
• Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
• That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
• I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.
• And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
• I want my name to mean me.
• I find people confusing.
• But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.

Mark Haddon Quotes About Children

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 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. — Mark Haddon

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

Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene. — Mark Haddon

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

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. — Mark Haddon

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

Many children's writers don't have children of their own. — Mark Haddon

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

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier. — Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon Quotes About Book

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

My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it. — Mark Haddon

If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed. — Mark Haddon

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

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. — 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

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything — Mark Haddon

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

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything. — Mark Haddon

Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder. — Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon Quotes About Writing

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

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away. — 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

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. — Mark Haddon

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country. — Mark Haddon

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

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today. — Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon Quotes About Fiction

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

As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read. — 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

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. — Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly. — Mark Haddon

People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you. — Mark Haddon

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

I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there. — Mark Haddon

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. — 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

I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them. — Mark Haddon

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible. — Mark Haddon

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

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. — 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

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? — Mark Haddon

Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet. — Mark Haddon

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

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

Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying. — Mark Haddon

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

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. — Mark Haddon

How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again. — 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

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

... 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

And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen. — Mark Haddon

He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility. — 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

And Father said, "Christopher, do you understand that I love you?" And I said "Yes," because loving someone is helping them when they get into trouble, and looking after them, and telling them the truth, and Father looks after me when I get into trouble, like coming to the police station, and he looks after me by cooking meals for me, and he always tells me the truth, which means that he loves me. — 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 do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand. — 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

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

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more. — Mark Haddon

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans. — Mark Haddon

B is for bestseller. — Mark Haddon

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

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

Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film. — 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

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. — Mark Haddon

Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky. — Mark Haddon

And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared. — Mark Haddon

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. — 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

..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

The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely. — 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

...and there was nothing to do except to wait and to hurt. — Mark Haddon

Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new. — Mark Haddon

And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end — 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

Life Lessons by Mark Haddon

1. Mark Haddon's work emphasizes the importance of empathy and understanding, as seen in his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
2. His work also shows that it is possible to find joy and beauty in the world, even in the midst of difficult circumstances.
3. Finally, Mark Haddon's work encourages readers to be open-minded and to look beyond their own preconceived notions of what is normal or acceptable.