Mark Haddon Quotes About Literature
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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.
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Writing for children is bloody difficult; books for children are as complex as their adult counterparts, and they should therefore be accorded the same respect.
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I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
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With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
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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.
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There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
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Many childrens writers dont have children of their own
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From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
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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? I read the King James Bible, as all English writers should. And when I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
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I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
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When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
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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.
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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.
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Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
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Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
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Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
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At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
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I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time... All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
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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.
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My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it.
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Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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