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'Still going uphill'

5 April 2010

I have a vivid memory of when Curious Incident took off, which was very early on, before it was published here, and it was quite scary. It's like having one of those dreams in which your car starts to fly. They're great, but if your car starts to fly in real life, it scares the living daylights out of you. And you know fairly quickly whether it will wreck your life, or whether you're going to ignore it. These days I ignore it completely.

What keeps you writing is that you don't ever enter a place that feels like home at last. You're still going uphill. There's still a little glowing light in the distance that you're trying to get to. I was writing something recently and I was chuckling at something I'd written, and my wife looked across and said, "Do you think that real writers do that?" And I didn't even notice it was funny at first, because I still think, "Oh, one day I'll be a real writer."

Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in the Daily Telegraph