Top 200 Mark Haddon Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I’ve written 16 children’s books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.”

— Mark Haddon

152. “As a kid, I didn’t read a great deal of fiction, and I’ve forgotten most of what I did read.”

— Mark Haddon

153. “Everyone in their little worlds.”

— Mark Haddon

154. “When he finally let the car it was because e could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space.”

— Mark Haddon

155. “He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that. He.”

— Mark Haddon

156. “Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one’s own best self.”

— Mark Haddon

157. “Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending.”

— Mark Haddon

158. “When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.”

— Mark Haddon

159. “And one of the friends died of fear that very nice and the other two were broken men for the rest of their lives.”

— Mark Haddon

160. “I think one of the things you have to learn if you’re going to create believable characters is never to make generalizations about groups of people.”

— Mark Haddon

161. “Show me the artist anywhere who’s had an utterly stable mental life, and I’ll buy you hot dinners for the rest of your life.”

— Mark Haddon

162. “Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.”

— Mark Haddon

163. “Your children never really grew up. Thirty year’s on and they still behaved like five-year old’s. One minute they were your best friend. Then you said the wrong thing and they went off like firecrackers.”

— Mark Haddon

164. “There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different – from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.”

— Mark Haddon

165. “I think good books have to make a few people angry.”

— Mark Haddon

166. “All those other lives. You never did get to lead them.”

— Mark Haddon

167. “We had a lot of argumants like that. Because I often thought I couldn’t take any more. And your father is really pacient but I’m not, I get cross, even though I don’t mean too. And by the end we stopped talking to each other very much because we knew it would always end up in an argumant and it would go nowere, And I felt realy lonley.”

— Mark Haddon

168. “Most men wanted to tell you what they knew. The route to Wisbech. How to get a log fire going. David made her feel she was the one who knew things. He.”

— Mark Haddon

169. “That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn’t be washed off.”

— Mark Haddon

170. “She understood now. You got married in spite of your wedding not because of it.”

— Mark Haddon

171. “But they are different because the pictures in my head are all pictures of things which really happened. But other people have pictures in their heads of things which aren’t real and didn’t happen.”

— Mark Haddon

172. “He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.”

— Mark Haddon

173. “Things can be funny when people are uneasy. It softens them up and stops them falling asleep on the sofa. I like those moments where people half-smile and half-wince.”

— Mark Haddon

174. “I’ve worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.”

— Mark Haddon

175. “Which was what she hated about the countryside, no distraction from the dirty messed-up workings of the heart.”

— Mark Haddon

176. “Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.”

— Mark Haddon

177. “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

178. “He had always seen his self-sufficiency as an admirable quality, a way of not imposing upon other people, but he could see now that it was an insult to those close to you.”

— Mark Haddon

179. “I am really interested in eccentric minds. It’s rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It’s really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.”

— Mark Haddon

180. “But she wasn’t really listening, because underneath it all ran the fear that it had nothing to do with good fortune, that he had earned this, and she resented him because she could have done it, too, if she’d applied herself properly, become a lawyer, moved to Canada, run a business, and what she saw when she looked at Richard was not his success but her own failure.”

— Mark Haddon

181. “He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home. An.”

— Mark Haddon

182. “Depending on yet more men seems to her like part of the problem. Better to rely on their own invisibility. A memory of that deer standing on the path then sprinting away. The sisterhood of idiot creatures, the wisdom that comes with knowing you could be prey.”

— Mark Haddon

183. “If kids like a picture book, they’re going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.”

— Mark Haddon

184. “Sweet mother if God thought George, surely this was not going to involve him? “George”? It was.”

— Mark Haddon

185. “I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they’d be easier.”

— Mark Haddon

186. “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

187. “After an Indian meal they went back to Jamie’s flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.”

— Mark Haddon

188. “But sometimes it is fun not knowing what the words mean because you can look them up in a dictionary...”

— Mark Haddon

189. “And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.”

— Mark Haddon

190. “It’s bloody hard telling the truth all the time.”

— Mark Haddon

191. “She has grown up as a woman. She has been taught to flatter, to please, to depend, to give way, to make herself small and quiet. She has been told to be soft so that men will always have a means by which they can hurt and control her, that ring through the nose which men call femininity. But she has silently refused to accept these lessons.”

— Mark Haddon

192. “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. But it would not be a very good way of making a living. 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

193. “He can see now that this is a delusion from which you suffer when the path chosen for you is a profitable one. When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.”

— Mark Haddon

194. “Poetry scares her, with its glimpses of the abyss between the slats of the swaying bridge.”

— Mark Haddon

195. “Una cosa es interesante porque pensamos en ella, no porque sea nueva.”

— Mark Haddon

196. “And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new.”

— Mark Haddon

197. “Perhaps the secret was to stop looking for greener grass. Perhaps the secret was to make the best of what you had.”

— Mark Haddon

198. “4. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a snail on it, and a long piece of orange string.”

— Mark Haddon

199. “It was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.”

— Mark Haddon

200. “The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzetti’s dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel.”

— Mark Haddon