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
clever work-out something-new
Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.
stars garden sky
...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.
ideas realizing good-ideas
I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
home long television
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.
children book latter
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
book writing people
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.
facts murder victim
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.
love giving-up teenage
At teenage parties he was always wandering into the garden, sitting on a bench in the dark . . . staring up at the constellations and pondering all those big questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil and the mystery of death, questions which seemed more important than anything else in the would until a few years passed and some real questions had been dumped into your lap, like how to earn a living, and why people fell in and out of love, and how long you could carry on smoking and then give up without getting lung cancer.
mean air bored
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.
eye lazy too-late
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
travel writing thinking
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
mother lying good-person
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.
latin stupid mean
And this shows that people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Which is Latin and it means: No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary. Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone who is dead.
people rainbow brain
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.