top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Books quotes
"A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books."
"Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?"
"Perhaps this new kind of reading will appeal to us after we give it a try."
"I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair."
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."
bottom of page