Top 200 Mark Haddon Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Mark Haddon

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “Find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.”

— Mark Haddon

3. “Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

— Mark Haddon

4. “Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are.”

— Mark Haddon

5. “I find people confusing.”

— Mark Haddon

6. “Everyone has learning difficulties, because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult.”

— Mark Haddon

7. “I like dogs. You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.”

— Mark Haddon

8. “But in life you have to take lots of decisions and if you don’t take decisions you would never do anything because you would spend all your time choosing between things you could do. So it is good to have a reason why you hate some things and you like others.”

— Mark Haddon

9. “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

10. “I want my name to mean me.”

— Mark Haddon

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

— Mark Haddon

12. “All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.”

— Mark Haddon

13. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

14. “On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.”

— Mark Haddon

15. “And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.”

— Mark Haddon

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

— Mark Haddon

17. “I do not like strangers because I do not like people I have never met before. They are hard to understand.”

— Mark Haddon

18. “Family, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.”

— Mark Haddon

19. “Never trust a man who doesn’t like animals. That’s my rule.”

— Mark Haddon

20. “I thought Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off.”

— Mark Haddon

21. “The secret of contentment lay in ignoring many things completely.”

— Mark Haddon

22. “And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss what other people thought.”

— Mark Haddon

23. “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

24. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

25. “I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I’d never be an astronaut.”

— Mark Haddon

26. “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

27. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

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

— Mark Haddon

29. “What he felt mostly was a relentless, grinding dread which rumbled and thundered and made the world dark, like those spaceships in science-fiction films whose battle-scorched fuselages slid onto the screen and kept on sliding onto the screen because they were, in fact, several thousand times larger than you expected when all you could see was the nose cone. The.”

— Mark Haddon

30. “Bore children, and they stop reading. There’s no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.”

— Mark Haddon

Featured in: Reading Quotes

31. “I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I do not tell lie.”

— Mark Haddon

32. “Being clever was when you looked at how things were and used the evidence to work out something new.”

— Mark Haddon

33. “Most murders are committed by someone who is known to the victim. In fact, you are most likely to be murdered by a member of your own family on Christmas day.”

— Mark Haddon

34. “I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.”

— Mark Haddon

35. “Lots of things are mysteries. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer to them. It’s just that scientists haven’t found the answer yet.”

— Mark Haddon

36. “But I don’t feel sad about it. Because Mother is dead. And because Mr. Shears isn’t around anymore. So I would be feeling sad about something that isn’t real and doesn’t exist. And that would be stupid.”

— Mark Haddon

37. “Usually people look at you when they’re talking to you. I know that they’re working out what I’m thinking, but I can’t tell what they’re thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.”

— Mark Haddon

38. “But I said that you could still want something that is very unlikely to happen.”

— Mark Haddon

39. “And then I thought that I had to be like Sherlock Holmes and I had to detach my mind at will to a remarkable degree so that I did not notice how much it was hurting inside my head.”

— Mark Haddon

40. “And because there is something they can’t see people think it has to be special, because people always think there is something special about what they can’t see, like the dark side of the moon, or the other side of a black hole, or in the dark when they wake up at night and they’re scared.”

— Mark Haddon

41. “But I don’t take notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won’t go to prison.”

— Mark Haddon

42. “1 This is not a metaphor, it is a simile, which means that it really did look like there were two very small mice hiding in his nostrils and if you make a picture in your head of a man with two very small mice hiding in his nostrils you will know what the police inspector looked like. And a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.”

— Mark Haddon

43. “Christopher explains that he ranks the day according to the number and color of the cars he sees on his way to school. Three red cars in a row equal a Good Day, and five equal a Super Good Day. Four yellow cars in a row make it a Black Day. On Black Days Christopher refuses to speak to anyone and sits by himself at lunch.”

— Mark Haddon

44. “Metaphors are lies.”

— Mark Haddon

45. “Mother used to say it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me.”

— Mark Haddon

46. “And then, after a while, she said, ‘Christopher, let me hold your hand. Just for once. Just for me. Will you? I won’t hold it hard.”

— Mark Haddon

47. “You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you’d hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.”

— Mark Haddon

48. “I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

— Mark Haddon

49. “But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.”

— Mark Haddon

50. “Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself. Mostly I read books about science and maths. I do not like proper novels. In proper novels people say things like, “I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which whose clench who do not depend on stimulus.” What does this mean? I do not know. Nor does Father. Nor does Siobhan or Mr. Jeavons. I have asked them.”

— Mark Haddon