Mark Haddon Quotes

Better that you should take the chance of trying something that is close to your heart, you think is what you want to write, and if they do not publish it, put it in your drawer. But maybe another day will come and you will find a place to put that.

I have been incredibly lucky with my novels but I had absolutely no idea if anyone would be interested in a cookbook. So I started to think about self-publishing.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don't do it unless you're willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I think I'm able to do so much because writing is what I love to do. So, often when I have free time, I choose to write and edit.

When I write, I make decent money doing it, but I don't wake up dreaming about writing.

I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.

I always thought it'd be fun to write something, but it never was an ambition of mine, per se.

The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.

I'm addicted to creating and writing.

I lost that excitement I had when I first started out. It was all about the need to just get a job, and so I found the joy again when I was writing Deuce Bigelow. I was laughing so hard and along with my writing partner at the time, simply laughing until we cried.

So, you pick this stuff here and this stuff there and then you see things in certain ways and you start visualizing and thank God I get the chance to do this. It's really the greatest thing in the whole wide world.

If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

I always write about what interests me.

I am happy to keep working on books because I'm always reading, and I'm always trying to fall in love.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.

I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.

There's no master plan; I'm just going with what I'm inspired to do and what I get asked to do, and luckily the things I've been the most passionate about, I've gotten to do. And a lot of times I've gone up for movies that I didn't really care that much about, and I never got that.

I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.