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
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.
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I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels.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.
book simple layers
My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
children book risk
The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different, even if there's a risk of it going wrong.
book kids littles
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
children book thinking
Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.
book thinking people
I think good books have to make a few people angry.
book taken darkness
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
book writing done
If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
book kids imperfection
If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
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.