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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.

Mark Haddon

If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

Many children's writers don't have children of their own.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon

That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. It needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.

Mark Haddon

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.

Mark Haddon

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

Mark Haddon