Top 200 Mark Haddon Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “But feelings are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.”

— Mark Haddon

52. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

53. “Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000.”

— Mark Haddon

54. “Life is a cowpat sandwich Jimbo.′ he sighed ’with a very thin bread and lots of filling.”

— Mark Haddon

55. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

56. “And what he meant was that maths wasn’t like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end.”

— Mark Haddon

57. “La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra.”

— Mark Haddon

58. “People believe in God because the world is very complicated and they think it is very unlikely that anything as complicated as a flying squirrel or the human eye or a brain could happen by chance. But they should think logically and if they thought logically they would see that they can only ask this question because it has already happened and they exist.”

— Mark Haddon

59. “Then, when I’ve got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.”

— Mark Haddon

60. “I did know what it meant when you say you promise something. You have to say that you will never do something again and then you must never do it because that would make the promise a lie.”

— Mark Haddon

61. “And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can’t see the desert because it is not a thing.”

— Mark Haddon

62. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

63. “He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me.”

— Mark Haddon

64. “I do not always do what I am told. And this is because when people tell you what to do it is usually confusing and does not make sense.”

— Mark Haddon

65. “I think most writers feel like they’re on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.”

— Mark Haddon

66. “It’s very nice of you to come and say hello.” I didn’t reply to this either because Mrs. Alexander was doing what is called chatting, where people say things to each other which aren’t questions and answers and aren’t connected.”

— Mark Haddon

67. “I used to have dreams that everything would get better. Do you remember, you used to say that you wanted to be an astranaut? Well, I used to have dreams where you were an astranaut and you were on the television and I thought that’s my son.”

— Mark Haddon

68. “It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house.”

— Mark Haddon

69. “Then he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.”

— Mark Haddon

70. “I like poetry when I don’t quite understand why I like it. Poetry isn’t just a question of wrapping something up and giving it to someone else to unwrap. It just doesn’t work like that.”

— Mark Haddon

71. “Es mejor saber que una cosa buena va a pasar, como un eclipse, o que te regalen un microscopio por Navidad, que saber que una cosa mala va a pasar, como que te pongan un empaste o tener que ir a Francia. Pero creo que lo peor de todo es no saber si lo que va a pasar es una cosa buena o una cosa mala.”

— Mark Haddon

72. “I went to boarding school, and then I went to Oxford, and I know how easy it is for certain groups of people to become wholly insulated from ordinary life.”

— Mark Haddon

73. “No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.”

— Mark Haddon

74. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

75. “Time is only the relationship between the different things changing.”

— Mark Haddon

76. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

77. “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

78. “Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people’s brains, or something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won’t be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.”

— Mark Haddon

79. “To be honest, I’m trying to maintain a Buddhist detachment about the whole thing to stop it taking ten years off my life.”

— Mark Haddon

80. “And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.”

— Mark Haddon

81. “At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy, it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.”

— Mark Haddon

82. “Grandmother has pictures in her head, too, but her pictures are all confused, like someone has muddled the film up and she can’t tell what happened in what order, so she thinks that dead people are still alive and she doesn’t know whether something happened in real life or whether it happened on television.”

— Mark Haddon

83. “Water purling between the rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind.”

— Mark Haddon

84. “I could invent another world. I’m not terribly keen on this one.”

— Mark Haddon

85. “Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance.”

— Mark Haddon

86. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

87. “I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don’t embarrass myself.”

— Mark Haddon

88. “Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself.”

— Mark Haddon

89. “And maybe Bob-with-the-Hawaiian-shirt was right. Maybe it was cool being on a planet on the far side of the known galaxy. And maybe it was even cooler escaping and getting home again. But the coolest thing of all was having my best friend back.”

— Mark Haddon

90. “Jane Austen writes about these humdrum lives with such empathy that they seem endlessly fascinating.”

— Mark Haddon

91. “She idly stroked his head in the way one might stroke a dog.”

— Mark Haddon

92. “I cared about dogs because they were faithful and honest, and some dogs were cleverer and more interesting than some people.”

— Mark Haddon

93. “Snow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.”

— Mark Haddon

94. “He asked whether I wanted to become an astronaut and I said I did. He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn’t take orders.”

— Mark Haddon

95. “Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.”

— Mark Haddon

96. “It exasperated her sometimes. The way men could be so sure of themselves. They put words together like sheds or shelves and you could stand on them they were so solid. And those feelings which overwhelmed you in the small hours turned to smoke.”

— Mark Haddon

97. “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

98. “What I love about the theatre is that it’s always metaphorical. It’s like going back to being a kid again, and we’re all pretending in a room. Sometimes, when the pretending really works, I find it much, much more moving than something on film.”

— Mark Haddon

99. “I’ve come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can’t describe.”

— Mark Haddon

100. “She is off the heart’s map and her compass is spinning.”

— Mark Haddon