Mark Haddon Quotes

I'm not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.

I had seen the great, but I had not seen the small.

When I look back on my ordinary, ordinary life, I see so much magic, though I missed it at the time.

The more you find out about the world, the more opportunities there are to laugh at it.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

A sponge sees everything? A sponge sees nothing.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

With time and experience comes a different perception of what's going on around you.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it's more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

See into life, don't just look at it.

I think what I like to do is to begin with the ordinary and find the extraordinary in it.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

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.

Thank God my life is normal. I work hard to make it normal. My husband and I don't want Hollywood drama. I go to the market and do the dishes. I'm not treated differently because I work on TV.

I think the ordinary is a very under-exploited aspect of our lives because it is so familiar.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

There's nothing unique about me as a parent. I am a parent. My kids are kids. We do the best we can do.

I think my life has been transformed by the ability to take things that exist in the world and look at them more closely. I think that's what art does at its best: it allows us to slow down.

It's an interesting education to listen to cricket commentary when you're not at the game. When you're there, which is most of the time for me, it flows over you. But when you're not there, you look at it in a slightly different way. You pick up things.

Everything is surprising, rightly seen.

It is but the littleness of man that seeth no greatness in trifles.

When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters.

We can see an anthill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an anthill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them - creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic that is inherent in all of these things already.

Important lessons: look carefully; record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.

Go on loving what is good, simple, and ordinary.