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The Word "metaphor" Means Carrying Something From One Place To Another . . . And It Is When You Describe Something By Using A Word For Something That It Isn't. This Means That The Word "metaphor" Is A Metaphor. I Think It Should Be Called A Lie Because A Pig Is Not Like A Day And People People Do Not Have Skeletons In Their Cupboards. And When I Try And Make A Picture Of The Phrase In My Head It Just Confuses Me Because Imagining And Apple In Someone's Eye Doesn't Have Anything To Do With Liking Someone A Lot And It Makes You Forget What The Person Was Talking About.

-Mark Haddon

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The Word "metaphor" Means

Mark Haddon

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The Word "metaphor" Means Carrying Something From One Place To Another . . . And It Is When You Describe Something By Using A Word For Something That It Isn't. This Means That The Word "metaphor" Is A Metaphor. I Think It Should Be Called A Lie Because A Pig Is Not Like A Day And People People Do Not Have Skeletons In Their Cupboards. And When I Try And Make A Picture Of The Phrase In My Head It Just Confuses Me Because Imagining And Apple In Someone's Eye Doesn't Have Anything To Do With Liking Someone A Lot And It Makes You Forget What The Person Was Talking About.

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Writing For Children Is Bloody Difficult; Books For Children Are As Complex As Their Adult Counterparts, And They Should Therefore Be Accorded The Same Respect.

The Secret Of Contentment Lay In Ignoring Many Things Completely.

It Exasperated Her Sometimes. The Way Men Could Be So Sure Of Themselves. They Put Words Together Like Sheds Or Shelves And You Could Stand On Them They Were So Solid. And Those Feelings Which Overwhelmed You In The Small Hours Turned To Smoke.

And This Shows That Sometimes People Want To Be Stupid And They Do Not Want To Know The Truth.

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.

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.

And I Know I Can Do This Because I Went To London On My Own, And Because I Solved The Mystery…and I Was Brave And I Wrote A Book And That Means I Can Do Anything.

Use Your Imagination And You'll See That Even The Most Narrow, Humdrum Lives Are Infinite In Scope If You Examine Them With Enough Care.

It Wasn't About Believing This Or That, It Wasn't Even 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.

...and There Was Nothing To Do Except To Wait And To Hurt.

..and Only Sticks And Stones Can Break My Bones.

The Most Difficult Book I Wrote Was The Fourth In A Series Of Linked Children's Books. It Was Like Pulling Teeth Because The Publisher Wanted Exactly The Same But Completely Different. I'd Much Rather Just Do Something Completely Different Even If There's A Risk Of It Going Wrong.

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.

Curious Incident Is Not A Book About Asperger's....if Anything It's A Novel About Difference, About Being An Outsider, About Seeing The World In A Surprising And Revealing Way. The Book Is Not Specifically About Any Specific Disorder.

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.

Madness Doesn't Happen To Someone Alone. Very Few People Have Experiences That Are Theirs Alone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And When The Universe Has Finished Exploding All The Stars Will Slow Down, Like A Ball That Has Been Thrown Into The Air, And They Will Come To A Halt And They Will All Begin To Fall Towards The Centre Of The Universe Again. And Then There Will Be Nothing To Stop Us Seeing All The Stars In The World Because They Will All Be Moving Towards Us, Gradually Faster And Faster, And We Will Know That The World Is Going To End Soon Because When We Look Up Into The Sky At Night There Will Be No Darkness, Just The Blazing Light Of Billions And Billions Of Stars, All Falling.

And Because There Is Something They Can’t See People Think It Has To Be Special, Because People Always Think There Is Something Special About What They Can’t See, Like The Dark Side Of The Moon, Or The Other Side Of A Black Hole, Or In The Dark When They Wake Up At Night And They’re Scared.

Books Are Like People. Some Look Deceptively Attractive From A Distance, Some Deceptively Unappealing; Some Are Easy Company, Some Demand Hard Work That Isn’t Guaranteed To Pay Off. Some Become Friends And Say Friends For Life. Some Change In Our Absence - Or Perhaps It Is We Who Change In Theirs - And We Meet Up Again Only To Find That We Don’t Get Along Any More.

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.

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.

I Read Very, Very Little Fiction As A Kid. All The Books I Can Remember Are Junior Science Books.

Being Clever Was When You Looked At How Things Were And Used The Evidence To Work Out Something New.

Most Murders Are Committed By Someone Who Is Known To The Victim. In Fact, You Are Most Likely To Be Murdered By A Member Of Your Own Family On Christmas Day.

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.

I Find People Confusing.

How Pleased We Are To Have Our Eyes Opened But How Easily We Close Them Again.

And It Occurred To Him That There Were Two Parts To Being A Better Person. One Part Was Thinking About Other People. The Other Part Was Not Giving A Toss What Other People Thought.

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

I Thought Bill Bryson's A Short History Of Nearly Everything Was Remarkable. Managing To Be Entertaining While Still Delivering All That Hard Science Was A Pretty Good Trick To Pull Off.

And 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.

And Father Said, "christopher, Do You Understand That I Love You?" And I Said "yes," Because Loving Someone Is Helping Them When They Get Into Trouble, And Looking After Them, And Telling Them The Truth, And Father Looks After Me When I Get Into Trouble, Like Coming To The Police Station, And He Looks After Me By Cooking Meals For Me, And He Always Tells Me The Truth, Which Means That He Loves Me.

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.

I Think I've Learnt That There Is No Character So Strange That You Haven't Shared Their Experience In Some Small Way.

He Really Did Not Care Whether He Survived Or Not, So Long As It Rendered Him Unconscious And Absolved Him Of Responsibility.

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People Think That Alien Spaceships Would Be Solid And Made Of Metal And Have Lights All Over Them And Move Slowly Through The Sky Because That Is How We Would Build A Spaceship If We Were Able To Build One That Big. But Aliens, If They Exist, Would Probably Be Very Different From Us. They Might Look Like Big Slugs, Or Be Flat Like Reflections. Or They Might Be Bigger Than Planets. Or They Might Not Have Bodies At All. They Might Just Be Information, Like In A Computer. And Their Spaceships Might Look Like Clouds, Or Be Made Up Of Unconnected Objects Like Dust Or Leaves.

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I Suffer Depression Only In The Sense That I Am A Writer. We Don't Have Proper Jobs To Go To. We Are On Our Own All Day. Show Me A Writer Who Doesn't Get Depressed: Who Has A Completely Stable Mood. They'd Be A Garage Mechanic Or Something.

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... Why I Like Timetables, Because They Make Sure I Don't Get Lost In Time.

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Difficult Situations

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.

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Find The Extraordinary Inside The Ordinary.

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I Was Born Too Late For Steam Trains And A Lazy Eye Meant I'd Never Be An Astronaut.

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I Think Good Books Have To Make A Few People Angry.

I Like Poetry When I Don't Quite Understand Why I Like It. Poetry Isn't Just A Question Of Wrapping Something Up And Giving It To Someone Else To Unwrap. It Just Doesn't Work Like That.

And I Go Out Of Father's House And I Walk Down The Street, And It Is Very Quiet Even Thought It Is The Middle Of The Day And I Can't Hear Any Noise Except Birds Singing And Wind And Sometimes Buildings Falling Down In The Distance, And If I Stand Very Close To Traffic Lights I Can Hear A Little Click As The Colors Change.

There's Something With The Physical Size Of America... American Writers Can Write About America And It Can Still Feel Like A Foreign Country.

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My Book Has A Very Simple Surface, But There Are Layers Of Irony And Paradox All The Way Through It.

But I Said That You Could Still Want Something That Is Very Unlikely To Happen.

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And What He Meant Was That Maths Wasn't Like Life Because In Life There Are No Straightforward Answers In The End

I Knew There Was A Story; Once You Find A Dog With A Fork Through It, You Know There's A Story There.

Show Me The Artist Anywhere Who's Had An Utterly Stable Mental Life, And I'll Buy You Hot Dinners For The Rest Of Your Life.

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.

I Started Writing Books For Children Because I Could Illustrate Them Myself And Because, In My Innocence, I Thought They'd Be Easier.

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I Have Very Fond Memories Of Swimming In Walden Pond When We Lived In Boston. You'd Swim Past A Log And See All These Turtles Sunning Themselves. Slightly Disturbing If You Thought About How Many More Were Swimming Around Your Toes, But Also Rather Wonderful.

You Make A Film You Feel Is As Real As Possible And Hope People React As Though It Were Real.

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If You Enjoy Math And You Write Novels, It's Very Rare That You'll Get A Chance To Put Your Math Into A Novel. I Leapt At The Chance.

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.

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.

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.

People Say That You Always Have To Tell The Truth. But They Do Not Mean This Because You Are Not Allowed To Tell Old People That They Are Old And You Are Not Allowed To Tell People If They Smell Funny Or If A Grown-up Has Made A Fart. And You Are Not Allowed To Say, 'i Don't Like You,' Unless That Person Has Been Horrible To You.

I've Written 16 Children's Books And Five Unpublished Novels. Some Of The Latter Were Breathtakingly Bad.

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.

You Love Someone, You've Got To Let Something Go.

What Actually Happens When You Die Is That Your Brain Stops Working And Your Body Rots, Like Rabbit Did When He Died And We Buried Him In The Earth At The Bottom Of The Garden. And All His Molecules Were Broken Down Into Other Molecules And They Went Into The Earth And Were Eaten By Worms And Went Into The Plants And If We Go And Dig In The Same Place In 10 Years There Will Be Nothing Exept His Skeleton Left. And In 1,000 Years Even His Skeleton Will Be Gone. But That Is All Right Because He Is A Part Of The Flowers And The Apple Tree And The Hawthorn Bush Now.

What I Love About The Theatre Is That It's Always Metaphorical. It's Like Going Back To Being A Kid Again, And We're All Pretending In A Room. Sometimes, When The Pretending Really Works, I Find It Much, Much More Moving Than Something On Film.

The Word "metaphor" Means Carrying Something From One Place To Another . . . And It Is When You Describe Something By Using A Word For Something That It Isn't. This Means That The Word "metaphor" Is A Metaphor. I Think It Should Be Called A Lie Because A Pig Is Not Like A Day And People People Do Not Have Skeletons In Their Cupboards. And When I Try And Make A Picture Of The Phrase In My Head It Just Confuses Me Because Imagining And Apple In Someone's Eye Doesn't Have Anything To Do With Liking Someone A Lot And It Makes You Forget What The Person Was Talking About.

I Better Make The Plot Good. I Wanted To Make It Grip People On The First Page And Have A Big Turning Point In The Middle, As There Is, And Construct The Whole Thing Like A Bit Of A Roller Coaster Ride...

I 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.

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.

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.

Science And Literature Give Me Answers. And They Ask Me Questions I Will Never Be Able To Answer.

Things Can Be Funny When People Are Uneasy. It Softens Them Up And Stops Them Falling Asleep On The Sofa. I Like Those Moments Where People Half-smile And Half-wince.

I Want My Name To Mean Me.

From A Good Book, I Want To Be Taken To The Very Edge. I Want A Glimpse Into That Outer Darkness.

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.

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.

But In Life You Have To Take Lots Of Decisions And If You Don't Take Decisions You Would Never Do Anything Because You Would Spend All Your Time Choosing Between Things You Could Do. So It Is Good To Have A Reason Why You Hate Some Things And You Like Others.

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.

Lots Of Things Are Mysteries. But That Doesn't Mean There Isn't An Answer To Them. It's Just That Scientists Haven't Found The Answer Yet.

Jane Austen Writes About These Humdrum Lives With Such Empathy That They Seem Endlessly Fascinating

Bore Children, And They Stop Reading. There's No Room For Self-indulgence Or Showing Off Or Setting The Scene.

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.

When I Was 13 Or 14, I Started Devouring Novels; Literature Took Quite A While To Take Me Over, But It Caught Up Just In Time To Save Me From Becoming A Mathematician.

If One Book's Done This Well, You Want To Write Another One That Does Just As Well. There's That Horror Of The Second Novel That Doesn't Match Up.

Appalling Things Can Happen To Children. And Even A Happy Childhood Is Filled With Sadnesses.

Indeed, I Am Repeatedly Astonished By The Number Of Really Good Writers Who Understand Human Beings So Well On Paper But Don't Know How To Deal With Them In Real Life.

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.

Well, We're Meant To Be Writing Stories Today.

As A Kid, I Didn't Read A Great Deal Of Fiction, And I've Forgotten Most Of What I Did Read.

And 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.

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.

I've Come To Realize That Most Good Ideas Are Precisely The Ones You Can't Describe.

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.

... He Had Always Rather Liked Emergencies. Other People's At Any Rate. They Put Your Own Problems Into Perspective. It Was Like Being On A Ferry. You Didn't Have To Think About What You Had To Do Or Where You Had To Go For The Next Few Hours. It Was All Laid Out For You.

...and I Went Into The Garden And Lay Down And Looked At The Stars In The Sky And Made Myself Negligible.

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