01c. 1962 ADI 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 themMark Haddon / quote ↗
02c. 1962 ADPrime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. 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 / quote ↗
03c. 1962 ADAnd when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light-years away from you. And some of the stars don’t even exist anymore because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in you life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible, which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
04c. 1962 ADAnd 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 / quote ↗
05c. 1962 ADI think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don't like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
06c. 1962 ADMiaowConsider me.I sit here like Tiberius,inscrutable and grand.I will let "I dare not"wait upon "I would"and bear the twanglingof your small guitarbecause you are my owland foster me with milk.Why wet my paw?Just keep me in a bagand no one knows the truth.I am familiar with witchesand stand a better chance in hell than youfor I can dance on hot bricks,leap your heightand land on all fours.I am the servant of the Living God.I worship in my way. Look into these slit green stonesand follow your reflected lights into the dark.Michel, Duc de Montaigne, knew.You don't play with me.I play with you.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
07c. 1962 ADA Rough GuideBe polite at the reception desk.Not all the knives are in the museum.The waitresses know that a nice boyis formed in the same way as a deckchair.Pay for the beer and send flowers.Introduce yourself as Richard.Do not refer to what somebody didat a particular time in the past.Remember, every Friday we used to gofor a walk. I walked. You walked.Everything in the past is irregular.This steak is very good. Sit down.There is no wine, but there is ice cream.Eat slowly. I have many matches.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
08c. 1962 ADSiobhan said that when you are writing a book you have to include some descriptions of things. I said that I could take photographs and put them in the book. But she said the idea of a book was to describe things using words so that people could read them and make a picture in their own head.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
09c. 1962 AD... why I like timetables, because they make sure I don't get lost in time.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
10c. 1962 ADLots of things are mystries. But that doesn't mean there isn't an answer to them. It's just that scientists haven't found the answer yet.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
12c. 1962 ADPrime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
13c. 1962 ADThen he asked if I didn’t like things changing. And I said I wouldn’t mind things changing if I became an astronaut, for example, which is one of the biggest changes you can imagine, apart from becoming a girl or dying.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
14c. 1962 ADMelissa 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 / quote ↗
15c. 1962 ADSnow... blots and softens the top of every object like ice on a plum pudding. Hedges, telegraph wires, cars, postboxes, recycling bins. The world is losing its edges. Look upwards and it seems as if the stars themselves are being poured from the sky and turn out not to be vast and fiery globes after all but tiny, frozen things which melt in the palm of your hand.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
16c. 1962 ADWater purling between the rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
17c. 1962 ADHe is the only man she has ever loved, and he has dumped her like ballast. She needs to find an explanation that does not make her a fool and him an animal, but every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
18c. 1962 ADPeople stick hearts on Valentine's cards and get married in white dresses and give each other flowers. They think love is every-thing going right. That's not love. That's self-indulgence. That's good luck. Love is when you walk into the burning building. Love is when the person who means most to you in the world is breathing through a mask and pissing in a bag. Love is when they no longer know your name.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
19c. 1962 ADThen, when I've got a degree in maths, or physics, or maths and physics, I will be able to get a job and earn lots of money and I will be able to pay someone who can look after me and cook my meals and wash my clothes, or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
21c. 1962 ADMaybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
22c. 1962 ADAfter an Indian meal they went back to Jamie's flat and Tony did at least two things to him on the sofa that no one had ever done to him before then came back and them again the following evening, and suddenly life became very good indeed.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
23c. 1962 ADIt was true. There really was no limit to the ways in which you could say the wrong thing to your children. You offered an olive branch and it was the wrong olive branch at the wrong time.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
24c. 1962 ADAppalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses. Is there any other period in your life when you hate your best friend on Monday and love them again on Tuesday? But at eight, 10, 12, you don't realise you're going to die. There is always the possibility of escape. There is always somewhere else and far away, a fact I had never really appreciated until I read Gitta Sereny's profoundly unsettling Cries Unheard about child-killer Mary Bell.At 20, 25, 30, we begin to realise that the possibilities of escape are getting fewer. We begin to picture a time when there will no longer be somewhere else and far away. We have jobs, children, partners, debts, responsibilities. And if many of these things enrich our lives immeasurably, those shrinking limits are something we all have to come to terms with.This, I think, is the part of us to which literary fiction speaks.Mark Haddon / quote ↗
