Top 200 Mark Haddon Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Think about today. Think about things that have happened. Especially about good things that have happened.”

— Mark Haddon

102. “You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.”

— Mark Haddon

103. “Payments to the disabled are getting slashed and people like me are getting a tax cut. Who could possibly think that is a good thing?”

— Mark Haddon

104. “Fischhoff calls this phenomenon “creeping determinism” – the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable – and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, “The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.”

— Mark Haddon

105. “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

106. “The police asked us whether we wanted counselling. We said we’d prefer a hot supper.”

— Mark Haddon

107. “He is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.”

— Mark Haddon

108. “And this is why people’s brains are like computers. And it’s not because they are special but because they have to keep turning off for fractions of a second while the screen changes. 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

109. “I better make the plot good. I wanted to make it grip people on the first page and have a big turning point in the middle, as there is, and construct the whole thing like a roller coaster ride.”

— Mark Haddon

110. “Indeed, I am repeatedly astonished by the number of really good writers who understand human beings so well on paper but don’t know how to deal with them in real life.”

— Mark Haddon

111. “Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer.”

— Mark Haddon

112. “I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there’s a story there.”

— Mark Haddon

113. “It wasn’t about believing this or that, it wasn’t even about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.”

— Mark Haddon

114. “Strange to discover that describing his fears out loud was less frightening than trying not to think about them. Something about seeing your enemy out in the open. The.”

— Mark Haddon

115. “Era la presa di coscienza nauseante di essere sbarcato sul pianeta sbagliato. O nella famiglia sbagliata. O nel corpo sbagliato. La presa di coscienza di non avere altra scelta che temporeggiare fino a quando non fosse stato in grado di andarsene e costruirsi un piccolo mondo tutto suo, dove si sarebbe sentito al sicuro.”

— Mark Haddon

116. “Everything in the garden became suddenly vivid as if some general membrane had been peeled away.”

— Mark Haddon

117. “I see everything.”

— Mark Haddon

118. “The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.”

— Mark Haddon

119. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

120. “All brave men are slightly stupid.”

— Mark Haddon

121. “She thought about the men with bows and arrows. They were really here, weren’t they, once upon a time. And mammoths and ladies in crinolines and Spitfires overhead. Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another thing. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night.”

— Mark Haddon

122. “I don’t mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one.”

— Mark Haddon

123. “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

124. “His mother had hated him for looking after her, then hated him for leaving. Five years living with an alcoholic woman and no one had thanked him. If there was such a thing as the moral high ground it was surely he who occupied it.”

— Mark Haddon

125. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

126. “Then he said, “Christopher, you.”

— Mark Haddon

127. “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.”

— Mark Haddon

128. “Then he snored and I jumped and I could hear the blood in my ears and my heart going really fast and a pain like someone had blown up a really big balloon inside my chest. I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack.”

— Mark Haddon

129. “Because adults forgot how porous that border was, the ease with which you could summon monsters and find treasure in any basement. Besides, adults talked to themselves. Was that any more rational?”

— Mark Haddon

130. “At home he was reading Pet Sematary, but reading that in public was like leaving the house in your underwear.”

— Mark Haddon

131. “From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.”

— Mark Haddon

132. “She can feel it all, centuries of habitation, paint over paint over plaster over stone.”

— Mark Haddon

133. “You love someone, you’ve got to let something go.”

— Mark Haddon

134. “Maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.”

— Mark Haddon

135. “You look around and it occurs to you that this isn’t real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn’t matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can’t remember where the present is and how to get back there.”

— Mark Haddon

136. “I always thought it was disgusting and ugly, how the weak live their lives depending on each other shamefully licking each other’s wounds. A way of life that no one could truly want. I was certain that no greatness could ever come from that. That’s what I thought until I met you.”

— Mark Haddon

137. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain things to the back of their mind was beyond him.”

— Mark Haddon

138. “So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real.”

— Mark Haddon

139. “I think I’ve learnt that there is no character so strange that you haven’t shared their experience in some small way.”

— Mark Haddon

140. “It was a stupid, insane, suicidal idea. Which makes it quite hard to explain why I decided to help. I guess it boils down to this. Charlie was my best friend. I missed him. And I couldn’t think of anything better to do. Really stupid reasons which were never going to impress the police, the headmistress or my parents. Looking back, I reckon this was the moment when my whole life started to go pear-shaped.”

— Mark Haddon

141. “Her only worry sometimes was that she didn’t look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She’d see a girl in patterned Doc Martens or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls.”

— Mark Haddon

142. “And all his molecules were broken down into other molecules and they went into the earth and were eaten by worms and went into the plants and if we go and dig in the same place in 10 years there will be nothing except his skeleton left. And in 1,000 years even his skeleton will be gone. But that is all right because he is a part of the flowers and the apple tree and the hawthorn bush now.”

— Mark Haddon

143. “That was because when I was little I didn’t understand about other people having minds.”

— Mark Haddon

144. “Reading is primarily a symptom. Of a healthy imagination, of our interest in this and other worlds, of our ability to be still and quiet, of our ability to dream during daylight.”

— Mark Haddon

145. “If he wasn’t careful he’d turn into one of those men who cared more about furniture than human beings. He’d end up living with someone else who cared more about furniture than human beings and they’d lead a life which looked perfectly normal from the outside but was, in truth, a kind of living death that left your heart looking like a raisin. Or.”

— Mark Haddon

146. “How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again.”

— Mark Haddon

147. “Maybe George was fooling himself. Maybe old people always fooled themselves, pretending that the world was going to hell because it was easier than admitting they were being left behind, that the future was pulling away from the beach and they were standing on their little island bidding it good riddance, knowing in their hearts that there was nothing left for them to do but sit around on the shingle waiting for the big disease to come out of the undergrowth.”

— Mark Haddon

148. “How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning. She.”

— Mark Haddon

149. “And I saw a man- go up to one of the doors of the train and press a big button next to it and the doors were electric and they slid open and I liked that.”

— Mark Haddon

150. “Madness doesn’t happen to someone alone. Very few people have experiences that are theirs alone.”

— Mark Haddon