Mark Haddon Quotes

One of the biggest problems in literature is the lack of subtlety.

The purpose of narrative is to present us with complexity and ambiguity.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

For kind of sophisticated art I'm interested in, the larger structural rebuke has to be so subtle that it has to be distributed at an almost sub-atomic level. Otherwise, you fall into the kind of preachy, moralistic fable that I don't think makes for good literature.

I have always loved really dense, complicated stories with lots of layers, tons of obscure literary references, and a plethora of inside jokes.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

With the 'Watchmen' comic, we attempted to tell it in an accessible way. I deliberately made the artwork very clear, deceptively so. You think you're sucking on a sweetie, but it turns out to be a sugar-coated chili.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Irony regards every simple truth as a challenge.

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

I like to think my sense of humor is sort of smart and dumb at the same time. I like to work on multiple levels - smart and dumb, funny and sad, profound and mundane, cynical and hopeful.

I think 'The Thing' is so good because it's not just a scary movie. It's also social commentary, which works on multiple levels, which is something I really respond to.

Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn.

Irony is one of my favorite aspects of life.

Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned - not out of any wish of mine, but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me.

My biggest superhero of writing is Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine fabulist. He's an amazingly perceptive writer, but also willing to make a joke.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

There are elements of irony in my work, of course.

There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

I think the job of movie reviewing can be really tough. If a film has layers that need to be thought about, it's easy to get missed the first time around.

Lyrics need to be good, but they don't need to be obvious right away.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

It's got a lot more room for nuance and an assumption that people have started from the beginning. 'Bloodline' ends up being like a really good novel.

I love long sentences. My big heroes of fiction writing are Henry James and Proust - people who recognise that life doesn't consist of declarative statements, but rather modifications, qualifications and feelings.