Top 84 Quotes by 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.

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.

The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.

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 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.

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.

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.

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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

I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.