Mark Haddon Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.

  Mark Haddon

  Eye, Lazy, Too Late

  "B is for bestseller" by Mark Haddon, www.theguardian.com. April 11, 2004.

  56 Copy quote

• I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.

  Mark Haddon

  Ideas, Realizing, Good Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Haddon

  Home, Long, Television

  4 Copy quote

• At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.

  Mark Haddon

  Country, Wrestling, Somewhere Else

  17 Copy quote

• I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a bit of a roller coaster ride...

  Mark Haddon

  People, Plot, Pages

  "The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon". PowellsBooks Interview, www.powells.com. October 10, 2006.

  7 Copy quote

• A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.

  Mark Haddon

  Real, Drama, People

  4 Copy quote

• Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

  Mark Haddon

  Stars, Sky, Sailing

  "The Red House by Mark Haddon - review" by Carol Birch, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• As a teenager, I was always this strange mixture of kind of vice-captain of the rugby team and sensitive artist type the rest of the time. I was sent away to this public school in the middle of nowhere, and I think we managed to completely miss out on normal youth culture.

  Mark Haddon

  Teenager, Team, School

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Haddon

  Book, Writing, Doe

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Haddon

  Thinking, Perfect, Darkness

  "'I'm flattered, amazed, deeply moved and sometimes a little dizzy'". The Guardian interview, www.theguardian.com. February 2, 2004.

  7 Copy quote

• Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.

  Mark Haddon

  Girl, Mind, Dying

  Mark Haddon (2012). “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: Vintage Children's Classics”, p.32, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.

  Mark Haddon

  Men, Feelings, Together

  4 Copy quote

• Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

  Mark Haddon

  Writing, Stories, Today

  Mark Haddon, Simon Stephens (2013). “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: The Play”, p.15, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

• I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.

  Mark Haddon

  People, Stranger, Mets

  4 Copy quote

• People say that you always have to tell the truth. But they do not mean this because you are not allowed to tell old people that they are old and you are not allowed to tell people if they smell funny or if a grown-up has made a fart. And you are not allowed to say, 'I don't like you,' unless that person has been horrible to you.

  Mark Haddon

  Mean, Smell, People

  14 Copy quote

• What actually happens when you die is that your brain stops working and your body rots, like Rabbit did when he died and we buried him in the earth at the bottom of the garden. And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing exept his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.

  Mark Haddon

  Flower, Garden, Skeletons

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Haddon

  Love, Teenage, Giving Up

  4 Copy quote

• The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.

  Mark Haddon

  Lying, Mean, Eye

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Haddon

  Mother, Lying, Good Person

  4 Copy quote

• And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.

  Mark Haddon

  Life, Thinking, France

  4 Copy quote

• Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.

  Mark Haddon

  Mean, Answers, Mystery

  Mark Haddon (2012). “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: Vintage Children's Classics”, p.125, Random House

  4 Copy quote

• You love someone, you've got to let something go.

  Mark Haddon

  Passenger Seat, Love Someone

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Mark Haddon

  Mean, Air, Work Out

  4 Copy quote

• People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves.

  Mark Haddon

  Moving, Reflection, Thinking

  9 Copy quote

• He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

  Mark Haddon

  Responsibility, Long, Care

  4 Copy quote

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