Prime 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

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

— Mark Haddon

She is off the heart's map and her compass is spinning.

— Mark Haddon

Siobhan 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

Snow... 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

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 we are sad. So we say we aren't sad. But we really are.

— Mark Haddon

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

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

Then 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

Then, when I've got a degree in math, or physics, or math 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