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I took the little radio from the kitchen and I went and sat in the spare room and I tuned it halfway between two stations so that all I could hear was white noise and I turned the volume up really loud and I held it against my ear and the sound filled my head and it hurt so that I couldn't feel any other sort of hurt, like the hurt in my chest
Mark Haddon Quotes: I took the little radio
to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs peters who wears a beige-coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.
Mark Haddon Quotes: to say that they have
And outside the window was like a map, except it was in 3 dimensions and it was life-size because it was the thing it was a map of.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And outside the window was
He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn't remember the last time someone had done that. He
Mark Haddon Quotes: He wanted to make her
That was because when I was little I didn't understand about other people having minds.
Mark Haddon Quotes: That was because when I
And maybe Bob-with-the-Hawaiian-shirt was right. Maybe it was cool being on a planet on the far side of the known galaxy. And maybe it was even cooler escaping and getting home again. But the coolest thing of all was having my best friend back.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And maybe Bob-with-the-Hawaiian-shirt was right.
Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Usually people look at you
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all can hear and then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else
Mark Haddon Quotes: I rolled back onto the
And something happened in Katie's heart, and she realized it wasn't just two people being joined together, not even two families. She felt as if she were joining hands with everyone who'd done this before her, just as she'd done after giving birth to Jacob, a feeling that she finally belonged, that she was part of the whole enterprise, a brick in that great arch which rose out of the dark behind you and swung over your head and curved into the future, and she was helping to keep it strong and solid, and helping to protect everyone beneath it.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And something happened in Katie's
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.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Every life is narrow. Our
As to the number of novels I've abandoned ... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort.
Mark Haddon Quotes: As to the number of
Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people's brains, or something about the earth's magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then ghosts won't be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Eventually scientists will discover something
I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them
Mark Haddon Quotes: I think prime numbers are
[ ... ] intuition can sometimes get things wrong. And intuition is what people use in life to make decisions.
Mark Haddon Quotes: [ ... ] intuition can
And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where the molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which stops you from being anemic was made in a star.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And all I could see
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.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I think most writers feel
You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you'd hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel warm inside.
Mark Haddon Quotes: You could ask for hugs
And one of the friends died of fear that very nice and the other two were broken men for the rest of their lives.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And one of the friends
There's something with the physical size of America ... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Mark Haddon Quotes: There's something with the physical
It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silcence but not empty.
Mark Haddon Quotes: It sounds like white noise
When he finally let the car it was because e could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space.
Mark Haddon Quotes: When he finally let the
And it was strange because he was calling, "Christopher ... ? Christopher ... ?" and I could see my name written out as he was saying it. Often I can see what someone is saying written out like it is being printed on a computer screen, especially if they are in another room. But this was not on a computer screen. I could see it written really large, like it was on a big advert on the side of a bus. And it was in my mother's handwriting
Mark Haddon Quotes: And it was strange because
Your children never really grew up. Thirty year's on and they still behaved like five-year old's. One minute they were your best friend. Then you said the wrong thing and they went off like firecrackers.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Your children never really grew
She understood now. You got married in spite of your wedding not because of it.
Mark Haddon Quotes: She understood now. You got
Depending on yet more men seems to her like part of the problem. Better to rely on their own invisibility. A memory of that deer standing on the path then sprinting away. The sisterhood of idiot creatures, the wisdom that comes with knowing you could be prey.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Depending on yet more men
He had always seen his self-sufficiency as an admirable quality, a way of not imposing upon other people, but he could see now that it was an insult to those close to you.
Mark Haddon Quotes: He had always seen his
I've come to realize that most good ideas are precisely the ones you can't describe.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I've come to realize that
And this shows that people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth. And it shows that something called Occam's razor is true. And Occam's razor is not a razor that men shave with but a Law, and it says:
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Which is Latin and it means:
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.
Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can't talk to someone who is dead.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And this shows that people
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.
Mark Haddon Quotes: No one wants to know
When I was writing for children, I was writing genre fiction. It was like making a good chair. However beautiful it looked, it needed four legs of the same length, it had to be the right height and it had to be comfortable.
Mark Haddon Quotes: When I was writing for
Everything seemed suspended, in some kind of balance. Obviously someone would come along and fuck it up, because that's what other people did.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Everything seemed suspended, in some
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Reading is a conversation. All
Her only worry sometimes was that she didn't look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She'd see a girl in patterned Doc Martens or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Her only worry sometimes was
How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.
Mark Haddon Quotes: How often did he feel
On the fifth day, which was a Sunday, it rained very hard. I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.
Mark Haddon Quotes: On the fifth day, which
And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And I think that there
You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.
Mark Haddon Quotes: You make a film you
Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand
pounds of muscle powering a hoop
of butcher's knives. The only animal
that ate its weaker siblings in the womb.
Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand<br>pounds of
He had never spoken to Uncle Richard, but he knew that he was a radiologist who put tubes into people's groins and pushed them up into their brains to clear blockages like chimney sweeps did and this was a glorious idea.
Mark Haddon Quotes: He had never spoken to
I am really interested in eccentric minds. It's rather like being fascinated by how cars work. It's really boring if your car works all the time. But as soon as something happens, you get the bonnet up. If someone has an abnormal or dysfunctional state of mind, you get the bonnet up.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I am really interested in
The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain things to the back of their mind was beyond him.
Mark Haddon Quotes: The secret of contentment, George
Why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Why I like timetables, because
Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn't count at school because it didn't get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Melissa popped open the clattery
And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And this shows that sometimes
But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in the rainforests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.
Mark Haddon Quotes: But the smoke goes out
And I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And I went into the
He said, 'are you telling the truth?'
I said, 'Yes. I always tell the truth.
Mark Haddon Quotes: He said, 'are you telling
People who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.
Mark Haddon Quotes: People who believe in God
And it's best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it's bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don't know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And it's best if you
He was an arsehole, but, God, she looked at Richard sometimes, the racing bike, the way he did the crossword in pencil first. There were evenings when she wanted Dad to ride in off the plains, all dust and sweat and tumbleweed, kick open the saloon doors and stick some bullet holes in those fucking art books.
Mark Haddon Quotes: He was an arsehole, but,
But you shoutet and you knocked those mixers off the shelf and there was a big crash.
Mark Haddon Quotes: But you shoutet and you
You look around and it occurs to you that this isn't real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn't matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can't remember where the present is and how to get back there.
Mark Haddon Quotes: You look around and it
..and only sticks and stones can break my bones.
Mark Haddon Quotes: ..and only sticks and stones
I find people confusing.
this is for 2 main reasons.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I find people confusing.<br>this is
One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.
Mark Haddon Quotes: One person looks around and
Sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army Knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self defense and I won't go to prison.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Sticks and stones can break
No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.
Mark Haddon Quotes: No one is ever really
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Jane Austen was writing about
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter
The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog ... I decided the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.
Mark Haddon Quotes: The dog was dead. There
And then, after a while, she said, 'Christopher, let me hold your hand. Just for once. Just for me. Will you? I won't hold it hard.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And then, after a while,
No one could see her out here, no one could judge her. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the animal that she was trapped inside, that grew and fed and wanted. She wished above all else to look ordinary so that people's eyes just slid over her. Because Mum was wrong. It wasn't about believing this or that, it wasn't about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world. Clouds scrolled high up. She couldn't get Melissa out of her head. Something magnetic about her, the possibility of a softness inside, the challenge of peeling back those layers.
Mark Haddon Quotes: No one could see her
I said that I wasn't clever. I was just noticing how things were, and that wasn't clever. That was just being observant.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I said that I wasn't
And it was exactly like having flu that time because I wanted it to stop, like you can just pull the plug of a computer out of the wall if it crashes, because I wanted to go to sleep so that I wouldn't have to think because the only thing I could think was how much it hurt because there was no room for anything else in my head, but I couldn't go to sleep and I just had to sit there and there was nothing to do except to wait and hurt.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And it was exactly like
I was born too late for steam trains and a lazy eye meant I'd never be an astronaut.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I was born too late
Obviously I have a capacity for feeling extreme anxiety, and there are people out there who don't. I'm to some extent rather jealous of them.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Obviously I have a capacity
That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn't be washed off.
Mark Haddon Quotes: That kind of party had
Life is difficult, you know. It's bloody hard telling the truth all the time. Sometimes it's impossible.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Life is difficult, you know.
He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. They were stacking up in my head like loaves in the factory where Uncle Terry works. The factory is a bakery and he operates the slicing machines. And sometimes a slicer is not working fast enough but the bread keeps coming and there is a blockage. I sometimes think of my mind as a machine, but not always as a bread-slicing machine. It makes it easier to explain to other people what is going on inside it.
Mark Haddon Quotes: He was asking too many
Sometimes we get sad about things and we don't like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don't know why we are sad, so we say we aren't sad but we really are.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Sometimes we get sad about
And so, if you get lost in time it is like being lost in a desert, except that you can't see the desert because it is not a thing.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And so, if you get
But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have a Swiss Army knife if they hit me.
Mark Haddon Quotes: But I don't take any
All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are.
Mark Haddon Quotes: All the other children at
Metaphors are lies.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Metaphors are lies.
And people are different from animals because they can have pictures on the screens in their heads of things which they are not looking at. They can have pictures of someone in another room. Or they can have a picture of what is going to happen tomorrow. Or they can have pictures of themselves as an astronaut. Or they can have pictures of really big numbers. Or they can have pictures of Chains of Reasoning when they're trying to work something out.

And that is why a dog can go to the vet and have a really big operation and have metal pins sticking out of its leg but if it sees a cat it forgets that it has pins sticking out of its leg and chases after the cat. But when a person has an operation it has a picture in its head of the hurt carrying on for months and months.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And people are different from
There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician. And they have just crossed the border into Scotland and they see a brown cow (and the cow is standing parralel tot the train). And the economist says, 'Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.' And the logician sais, 'No. there are cows in Scotland of which one, at least, is brown.'And the mathematician says, 'No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.
Mark Haddon Quotes: There are three men on
Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you just said before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Siobhan also says that if
Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Perhaps everyone possessed a darker
People think computers are different from people because they don't have minds, even though, in the Turing test, computers can have conversations with people about the weather and wine and what Italy is like, and they can even tell jokes.
Mark Haddon Quotes: People think computers are different
People assumed Melissa was vegetarian out of cussedness, or maybe as an outlet for the empathy she didn't expend on human beings, but it was sloppy thinking she hated. She cared little for the suffering of cattle or sheep but why eat them and not dogs? It wasn't so much a belief as the obvious thing to do. She hated injustice without feeling much sympathy for those who had been treated unjustly. She thought that all drugs should be legal and that giving money to charity was pointless. And she liked the fact that these opinions made her distinctive and intelligent. In many respects she was like her father. Not the dirt under his nails, not the prickly pride in his under-education but the way his sense of self depended so much on other people being in the wrong.
Mark Haddon Quotes: People assumed Melissa was vegetarian
Also people think they're not computers because they have feelings and computers don't have feelings. But feeling are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happened, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Also people think they're not
Fiction that responds to recent world events is a hostage to fortune, because all momentous events look very different a year, two years, three years later.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Fiction that responds to recent
Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Eventually we find that we
You love someone, you've got to let something go.
Mark Haddon Quotes: You love someone, you've got
I liked maths because it meant solving problems, and these problems were difficult and interesting but there was always a straightforward answer at the end
Mark Haddon Quotes: I liked maths because it
There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different - from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
Mark Haddon Quotes: There was a time in
So often these days she seemed to hover between worlds, none of them wholly real.
Mark Haddon Quotes: So often these days she
said this. He kept on looking through
Mark Haddon Quotes: said this. He kept on
I think good books have to make a few people angry.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I think good books have
I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I've written 16 children's books
And that is why people think that computers don't have minds, and why people think that their brains are special, and different from computers. Because people can see the screen inside their head and they think there is someone in their head sitting there looking at the screen, like Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation sitting in his captain's seat looking at a big screen. And they think that this person is their special human mind, which is called a homunculus, which means a little man. And they think that computers don't have this homunculus.

But this homunculus is just another picture on the screen in their heads. And when the homunculus is on the screen in their heads (because the person is thinking about the homunculus) there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. And when the person thinks about this part of the brain (the bit that is watching the homunculus on the screen) they put this bit of the brain on the screen and there is another bit of the brain watching the screen. But the brain doesn't see this happen because it is like the eye flicking from one place to another and people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another.
Mark Haddon Quotes: And that is why people
A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn't happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn't happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn't happen.
For example, this morning for breakfast I had Ready Brek and some hot raspberry milkshake. But if I say that I actually had Shreddies and a mug of tea I start thinking about Coco-Pops and lemonade and Porridge and Dr Pepper and how I wasn't eating my breakfast in Egypt and there wasn't a rhinoceros in the room and Father wasn't wearing a diving suit and so on and even writing this makes me feel shaky and scared, like I do when I'm standing on the top of a very tall building and there are thousands of houses and cars and people below me and my head is so full of all these things that I'm afraid that I'm going to forget to stand up straight and hang onto the rail and I'm going to fall over and be killed.
This is another reason why I don't like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn't happen and they make me feel shaky and scared.
And this is why everything I have written here is true.
Mark Haddon Quotes: A lie is when you
He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home. An
Mark Haddon Quotes: He sat on the tube
That was the problem, wasn't it? You left home. But you never did become an adult. Not really. You just fucked up in different and more complicated ways.
Mark Haddon Quotes: That was the problem, wasn't
What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older. You could tell the truth, be polite, take everyone's feelings into consideration and still have to deal with other people's shit. At nine or ninety.
Mark Haddon Quotes: What they failed to teach
Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.
Mark Haddon Quotes: Perhaps the best you could
I think the U.K. is too small to write about from within it and still make it seem foreign and exotic and interesting.
Mark Haddon Quotes: I think the U.K. is
He said that it was very difficult to become an astronaut. I said that I knew. You had to become an officer in the air force and you had to take lots of orders and be prepared to kill other human beings, and I couldn't take orders. Also I didn't have 20/20 vision, which you needed to be a pilot.
Mark Haddon Quotes: He said that it was
Then he said, "Christopher, you
Mark Haddon Quotes: Then he said,
People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark.
Mark Haddon Quotes: People disappear, leaving only bodies
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