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
writing empathy humdrum
Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating
prayer believe fall
One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.
country writing america
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
children
Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
perspective ordinary extraordinary
Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
cutting thinking people
Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?
distance book hard-work
Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.
book differences world
Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder,
book writing shoes
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
mother real stupid
But I don't feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn't around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn't real and doesn't exist. And that would be stupid.
hurt feelings hug
You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.
father distance fall
And I go out of Father's house and I walk down the street, and it is very quiet even thought it is the middle of the day and I can't hear any noise except birds singing and wind and sometimes buildings falling down in the distance, and if I stand very close to traffic lights I can hear a little click as the colors change.
literature becoming caught
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.
years two three
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.