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"Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well."
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"Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid."

"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."

"The new spirituality will bring about what I'm calling the 'end of better.' And that is in fact what is called for in the next of the series of books that I've been writing."
Explore more quotes by Mark Haddon

"As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read."

"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."

"My book has a very simple surface, but there are layers of irony and paradox all the way through it."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier."

"No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own."
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