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Mark Haddon Quotes


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Mark Haddon
September 26, 1962 -
Nationality: English
Category: Novelist
Subcategory: English Novelist

B is for bestseller.

   

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.

   

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

   

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.

   

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.

   

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

   

I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

   

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

   

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

   

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.

   

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.

   

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

   

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.

   

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

   

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.

   

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 think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.

   

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

   

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

   

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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