Mark Haddon Book Quotations

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

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

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.

I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

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.

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.

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

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.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Siobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.

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.

...and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything