Literary Birthday – 26 September – Mark Haddon

Happy Birthday, Mark Haddon, born on 26 September 1962.

Mark Haddon Quotes

1. The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, ‘I could invent another world. I’m not terribly keen on this one.’
2. So many of my days feel like wasted time (especially now as I stagger zombie-like through an extended post-Covid fog). To my repeated surprise, however, much of that wasted time often turns out, in retrospect, to have been very useful (many years ago I spent months on end learning how to draw using a mouse with the then-revolutionary Paint program which came bundled with early iterations of Windows; I then used the technique to create the illustrations in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).
3. For me, the proudest moments are those when I pick up something I’ve written – whether it was yesterday or twenty years ago – and get the buzz I get from any good writing and think, ‘Yes, I got that just right’. It doesn’t happen often.
4. I think the world would be a better place if more people – writers included – stopped telling other people what they should do.
5. If I reach the end of day without having made some small new thing and put it into the world – whether it’s a paragraph or a picture of some kind – the day feels wasted and I feel out of kilter.
6. I think to make half decent art of any kind– whether you’re singing an aria, throwing a pot or writing a haiku – you need the ability to wear two hats and swap between them easily and quickly. You need to be the maker, the performer, you need to immerse yourself in the work. But you also need to be able to step back and see what you’re doing through the eyes of a complete stranger and be ruthlessly objective. Does this work? Does this move me?
7. I can’t write without imagining in great detail the building or landscape within which any scene is taking place. Sometimes I will go so far as to draw maps and plans which act as scaffolding which I throw away when the text is finally finished.

Source for quotes 2-4: RLF and 5-7: The Floating Circle

Quotes from The Curious Incident

1. Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. …and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Mark Haddon is an English novelist, artist, and poet. He is best known for his 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which won 17 literary prizes and was adapted into a West End stage play. He has also written The Porpoise, A Spot Of Bother, and The Red House. He has also written a short story collection, Dogs and Monsters: Stories. He explores themes of family dysfunction, the search for truth, and the human need for order amid chaos. In 2023, he turned down an OBE for his services to literature, saying: ‘I would feel uneasy accepting an honour which presumes an uncritical acceptance of the British Empire as a good thing.’ In 2026, he published Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour. Mark Haddon teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and at Oxford University. Follow him on Instagram.

Source for image: The Poetry Foundation

by Amanda Patterson
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