Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon
Mark Haddonis an English novelist, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He won the Whitbread Award, Guardian Prize, and a Commonwealth Writers Prize for his work...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth26 September 1962
books entirely found interested
I'm really interested in the extraordinary found in the normal. Hopefully, my books don't take you to an entirely different place but make you look at things around you.
constant exhaustion hard lots novelist poet
I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
graveyard people trying whose
If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.
ask english-novelist questions science
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
english-novelist
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
bit intake people time took
It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn't like film. It's a bit like when people say they don't like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.
I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
child english-novelist fiction readers reads
Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person.
invent keen main terribly
The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, 'I could invent another world. I'm not terribly keen on this one.'
teenager team school
As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.
want-something said unlikely
But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.
children book writing
I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
stars nice taken
And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.
real drama giving
A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.