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
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.
mean two fiction
I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.
father two white
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else
thinking two giving
And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.
ask english-novelist questions science
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
I've always really enjoyed writing different things because I get bored very easily.
best days paint seem
My best days do seem like a distillation of all that was best about school. Write a story! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a print!
logical numbers prime rules spend thinking time work
I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spend all your time thinking about them
access amazed club earn lots money people quite
I am quite amazed how, when people earn lots of money, they think they have to spend it on things that give them access to the club constituted by the people who are in their tax bracket.
earn freedoms good money stuff throw
One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.
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.
kids minor picture
If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times, and their parents are going to have to read it with them. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
analyse british came divorced families full men slightly society tried whom
If you came from Mars and tried to analyse British or American society through novels, you'd think our society was preponderantly full of middle-aged, slightly alcoholic, middle-class, intellectual men, most of whom are divorced from their families and have nothing to do with children.
capacity extent extreme obviously people rather
Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them.