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.
Mark HaddonPrime 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 HaddonSiobhan 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 HaddonAnd 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