Mark Haddon Quotes

I suffer from depression and anxiety, and having a show and having a character that portrays a young woman who is dealing with that and the consequences of it - how it affects her friendships and her relationships with her mom and her sister - it's beautiful to see that.

My life revolves around my writing, my wife and my son.

I write for kids because I think the most interesting (and most humorous) stories come from people's childhoods. When I was writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I had a blast talking on the phone to my younger brother, Patrick, remembering all of the things that happened to our family when we were growing up.

In the investigation of a neurotic style of life, we must always suspect an opponent, and note who suffers most because of the patient's condition. Usually this is a member of the family.

Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.

My whole family, my father's side, there was a great deal of depression, and my mother's side as well.

Well, my brother was a schizophrenic, so I understood it in a different way from seeing my brother.

I think every family is dysfunctional, and some manage to control it better than others.

I've never been to a shrink. But my parents were very psychologically literate - my father had undergone Freudian analysis - and we often talked about other people in psychological terms, so I picked up a lot of that.

Family tends to be one of the recurring themes in my fiction.

In Jenny Offill's remarkable first novel, 'Last Things,' 7-year-old Grace Davitt watches her mother, Anna, descend into madness and tries to make sense of the claustrophobic world that Anna has created for her.

Family things are always tough, and they're always tough to address, let alone on a TV show.

The family. We are a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms. . . and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

No man will be respected by others who is despised by his own relatives.

I think the world today is upside down, and is suffering so much, because there is so very little love in the homes and in family life.

The romantic element is what the story Essential Maps for the Lost, sort of sits on, but all the stuff below the surface is really about family. It's about the baggage we bring, both the good and the hard stuff in that baggage. It's more about the other relationships. It's about mothers and fathers and sisters and dogs, all of the pieces. It's really more about - yes, love, in its widest usage.

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.

According to my daughters, my most irritating habit is asking for cups of tea.

You have family", Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family".

An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.

As to the family, I have never understood how that fits in with the other ideals --or, indeed, why it should be an ideal at all. A group of closely related persons living under one roof; it is a convenience, often a necessity, sometimes a pleasure, sometimes the reverse; but who first exalted it as admirable, an almost religious ideal?

I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.

This was the trouble with families. Like invidious doctors, they knew just where it hurt.

I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.

If you’re not crazy there’s something wrong with you. Willie Nelson