Mark Haddon

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

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.

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.

I had this wild imagination. I was never me. All my childhood photos, I'm in fancy dress, playing a Russian refuge or Marvelous Mad Madam Mim.

As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.

It appalls me that the people who decide what Americans will be watching on the tube have never been to the United States. Not the real United States.