Literary Birthday – 26 September – Mark Haddon

Happy Birthday, Mark Haddon, born 26 September 1962.

“The main impetus for being a writer is thinking, ‘I could invent another world. I’m not terribly keen on this one.'”

Quotes from The Curious Incident

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
…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.