Mark Haddon Quotes

Long-term boredom can't lead to anything good.

Descriptions of my work depress me. They make me feel pinned down.

I really don't need to suffer. I can really become a happy person and still make good music - in fact, better music.

I'm sick when I don't work for year or two.

I think all good architecture should challenge you, make you start asking questions. You don't have to understand it. You may not like it. That's OK.

Everyone who goes to a job he doesn't like is a lot weirder than I am.

Many people are in a rut and a rut is nothing but a grave - with both ends kicked out.

It's hard to draw clear lines between writing and life and I don't think it is necessary to or necessarily good to.

What good is it to live a life that brings pains?

If you look at what I do, there's no consistency. The consistency is that there is no consistency. I do projects that are good and not so good.

Good taste is death; vulgarity is life.

I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do.

I don't understand the joy of sitting in my house with nothing to do.

The idea of going off to an office every day and 'putting on my art hat' doesn't appeal.

I didn’t do anything. I don’t have an explanation, I don’t know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore

There are some people who want me and my husband to stay where it is safe and draw a paycheck every week instead of what we are doing (which is creating and sharing our art with others). The truth is that there are people in this world - Dave and I being two - who would die a slow painful death if stuck in an office and made to do the kind of work that we are not made to do.

Dada is a state of mind.

A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive.

Boredom is a horrible thing.

The artist is likely to be looked upon with some uneasiness by the more conservative members of society.

I feel dance and pop music genres are extremely female and extremely gay. When it comes to art and pop culture, queers are f - king weirdos. We don't have gender rules that tell us what we can and can't be. We just make it up as we go along. We have full creative license to be whatever we want to be.

Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. The idea of the rigid style seemed to me then something you needn't concern yourself with, it would trap you.

I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I write will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from.

Don't create for the masses. Create for the people who are your kind of weird.