Art & Creativity Quote by Mark Haddon

There’s a quiet glee in Haddon’s line: the thrill of a private obsession finally finding a public stage. He’s not mythologizing “STEM meets art” as some grand cultural reconciliation; he’s admitting something more specific and more revealing. If you love math and you write fiction, most of the time you’re expected to keep those loves in separate rooms. Novels, the market implies, are for feelings and plot, while math is for homework, labs, and people who don’t get invited to the party.

Haddon’s “very rare” is doing more work than it seems. It nods to an industry bias: the suspicion that mathematics is alienating, cold, too technical, too easily mistaken for showing off. So when he says he “leapt,” it’s partly creative excitement and partly resistance to that expectation. He’s claiming math as a legitimate narrative texture, not a garnish.

The subtext is also about permission. A novelist doesn’t just “include” math; he needs a story-world where math belongs emotionally. In Haddon's most famous context, the math isn’t trivia, it’s character logic: a way of ordering chaos, a language that can be safer than small talk, a refuge that doubles as a constraint. The leap is toward honesty about how some minds move through the world.

It’s a canny, almost tactical statement: math enters the novel not as a lecture, but as a tool for empathy, smuggled in under the banner of plot.