Zitat des Tages von Mark Haddon:
A lot of roles for people with disabilities are quite patronising. It's a real pity when they are just used to give dull PC kudos to a drama, or when they're wheeled on in a tokenistic way without any real involvement in the plot.
I started writing books for children because I could illustrate them myself and because, in my innocence, I thought they'd be easier.
No one wants to know how clever you are. They don't want an insight into your mind, thrilling as it might be. They want an insight into their own.
The way of creating believable characters is not by conforming to a set of PC rules.
I like having my back pressed against a wall and being made to work harder so I don't embarrass myself.
Many children's writers don't have children of their own.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Most adults, unlike most children, understand the difference between a book that will hold them spellbound for a rainy Sunday afternoon and a book that will put them in touch with a part of themselves they didn't even know existed.
Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.
I think good books have to make a few people angry.
I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn't like film. It's a bit like when people say they don't like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.
That's important to me, to find the extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Every life is narrow. Our only escape is not to run away, but to learn to love the people we are and the world in which we find ourselves.
Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.
At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We have jobs, children, partners, debts. This is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.
Humour and high seriousness... Perfect bedfellows, I think. Though I usually phrase it in terms of comedy and darkness. Comedy without darkness rapidly becomes trivial. And darkness without comedy rapidly becomes unbearable.
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subjects. Instead, I've rather reluctantly realised that what I write about is families.
With English literature, if you do a bit of shonky spelling, no one dies, but if you're half-way through a maths calculation and you stick in an extra zero, everything just crashes into the ravine.
I am atheist in a very religious mould. I'm always asking myself the big questions. Where did we come from? Is there a meaning to all of this? When I find myself in church, I edit the hymns as I sing them.
One of the freedoms you get if you earn a lot of money from a book is to throw away what you want. And if you throw a lot away, the good stuff always comes back; nothing is lost.
From a good book, I want to be taken to the very edge. I want a glimpse into that outer darkness.
B is for bestseller.
Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.
I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas, I think one of the functions laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine horror.
Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.
I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.
As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Bore children, and they stop reading. There's no room for self-indulgence or showing off or setting the scene.
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
I knew there was a story; once you find a dog with a fork through it, you know there's a story there.
For me, disability is a way of getting some extremity, some kind of very difficult situation, that throws an interesting light on people.
I've worked in television long enough to know that when you stop enjoying that type of thing you go home and do something else.
If kids like a picture book, they're going to read it at least 50 times. Read anything that often, and even minor imperfections start to feel like gravel in the bed.
