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
religious atheist hymns
I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
book thinking people
I think good books have to make a few people angry.
character thinking way
I think I've learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven't shared their experience in some small way.
car mind abnormal
I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.
thinking perfect darkness
Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.
thinking numbers effort
As to the number of novels I've abandoned... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.
running writing gay
I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
imagination care use
Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care.
character creating way
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
artist dinner rest-of-your-life
Show me the artist anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life, and I'll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.
clever mind literature
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.
character thinking people
I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.
book taken darkness
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
moving kids theatre
What I love about the theatre is that it's always metaphorical. It's like going back to being a kid again, and we're all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.