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"Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed."
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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 more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."
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."
"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."
"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."
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