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"I don't mean that literary fiction is better than genre fiction, On the contrary; novels can perform two functions and most perform only one."
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"Villainessa Tittel was a hired killer, an assassin by trade. She had enjoyed the best education and had been trained by assassins who had (until then at least) been considered the best in the business. She had turned to 'cleaning' as an occupation because she really enjoyed endings more than beginnings " and anyway, she didn't need to know her mark's entire pedigree or life's story, or to have some kind of facetious moral justification just to collect her fee. Unsurprisingly, when she did read " on those rare occasions " her books were always dog-eared from the back."
"Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction."
"I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying."
"But to be perfectly frank, this childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it's ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended."
"In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds."
"For some, vampires are still firmly in the 'evil, scary' column. However, in recent decades, vampires also run the gamut from evil to morally ambiguous all the way to fangless and vegetarian. I think part of their appeal lies in their versatility. Vampires can be the villain, the hero, and everything in between, all depending on the writer's whim. You'll also never hear me say that anyone is doing vampires 'wrong' because unless a real vampire stands up and sets the record straight, it's anyone's game as a far as defining them in fiction."
Explore more quotes by Mark Haddon
"If you enjoy math and you write novels, it's very rare that you'll get a chance to put your math into a novel. I leapt at the chance."
"As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read."
"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."
"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."
"Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen."
"I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier."
"For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people."
"I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad."
"There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country."
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