Mark Haddon Quotes

Young readers have to be entertained. No child reads fiction because they think it’s going to make them a better person.

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.

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.

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.

There’s something with the physical size of America… American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else’s shoes. The reader’s shoes. You’ve got to entertain them.