Mark Haddon Quotes

I think I am a pretty good at understanding each character of each person I meet.

Life is a matter of dealing with other people, in little matters and cataclysmic ones, and that means a series of conversations.

As for 'drawing you out,' please believe I don't do such things deliberately, with an object -- It's only that I am, as a rule, far more interested in people than they are in me -- But it makes me a nuisance, I know: only an innocent nuisance.

I've never been interested in things that sparkle and shine; I'm more interested in people.

I'm just totally fascinated by people.

I'm just incredibly interested in people.

Because I am fascinated by people and what makes them behave the way they do. I think it is one of the most fascinating things in the world.

I envy people who have the capacity to sit with another human being and find them endlessly interesting, I would rather watch TV. Of course this becomes eventually known to the other person.

I'm a big fan of human dynamics. Nothing fascinates me more than really interesting people and human dynamics.

When one is not understood one should as a rule lower one's voice, because when one really speaks loudly enough and is not heard, it is because people do not want to hear. One had better begin to mutter to oneself, then they get curious.

Understanding people certainly impacts your ability to communicate with others.

The worst of having so much tact was that you never quite knew whether other people were acting naturally or being tactful too. [The human element]

The difficult thing isn't living with other people, it's understanding them.

When you go on vacation with people, you learn a lot about them.

My biggest job really is to figure other people out. I need to understand what makes a person tick.

It's a difficult question of relations between people.

Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them.

My job is about playing people. And I think once you lose touch with people, what do you play?

When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.

I think humans are just hard-wired to process people's faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.

I like to connect with people and suss them out. There's no better way than seeing how they react if you just bear into them.

I'm at my best when I'm talking about relationships, talking about women, talking about situations and stories.

Working with different people anyway is like life and meeting different people... as long as you can be empathetic, you can take a bit of them on and see what you can do to help their process. That said, my relationship with Woody Allen was trying to hang on his every word so that I could tell everybody what he said afterwards. But certainly, he was a very good example of somebody who you didn't hear talk above a very low volume for the entire time he was on-set.

It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.

one never knows really how things are with other people, they just do always seem more spirited than oneself somehow.