English - Novelist | September 26, 1962 -
I'm really lucky in that I can do lots of different things. It must be really hard to just be a poet or just be a novelist - a constant cycle of effort and exhaustion and recuperation.
Mark Haddon
EffortI CanLuckyHardThingsPoet
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
WorkGoodWritingSecretOutMost
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.
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If you're trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop, it's the graveyard of people whose books haven't been wanted.
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B is for bestseller.
Bestseller
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.
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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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As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
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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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Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
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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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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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