Quotes by Mark Haddon

"I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something."

"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."

"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."

"For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people."

"My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it."

"From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness."

"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."

"Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well."

"I think one of the things you have to learn if you're going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people."

"I really like the idea of being a bit unpredictable. I'm known for being a nice, easy-going person with a straightforward exterior. So I think a bit of me wants to be sort of sly and devious."

"Use your imagination, and you'll see that even the most narrow, humdrum lives are infinite in scope if you examine them with enough care."

"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? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them."

"Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it's going to make them a better person."

"I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up."

"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."

"I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful."

"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."

"There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Madness doesn't happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone."

"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."

"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."

"Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer."

"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."

"There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane."

"Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing."