Philip Pullman Quotes
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I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.
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People here cannot conceive of worlds where dæmons are a silent voice in the mind and no more. Can you imagine my astonishment, in turn, at learning that part of my own nature was female, and bird-formed, and beautiful?
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The only instrument I play myself is the ukulele.
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Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.
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Lord Asriel is just a man, with human power, no more than that. But his ambition is limitless. He dares to do what men and women don't even dare to think.
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My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading 'proper' books, too.
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Without their tiger gods, the tribe declined into fear and melancholy and begged her to allow them to worship her instead, only to be rejected with contempt; for what good would their worship do her? she asked. It had done nothing for the tigers.
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Education and health were always matters of charity. You educated children and you helped the sick because they were good things to do, not because you were going to make money out of them. If you let the money-making principle, the profit-seeking motive, anywhere near education and health, things go bad.
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I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.
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I write in pen because it works. A fountain pen is no good for writing in the way I do because I'd have to decide, each time I stopped, how long I was likely to stop for in order to know whether or not to put the cap on. But I never know. So instead, I use a ballpoint - a Montblanc, to be precise - the most comfortably balanced pen I've ever found.
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Everyone in the book's ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.
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The best sort of activity is one that combines mental effort with sensuous delight. That's why I love drawing.
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Will darted back to the gutter, and picked up the knife, and the fight was over. The young man, cut and battered, clambered up the step, and saw Will standing above him holding the knife; he stared with a sickly anger and then turned and fled.
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'That is how it seems....But we can’t read the darkness, Mr. Scoresby. It is more than possible that I might be wrong.'
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And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?
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'And then what?' said her Dæmon sleepily 'build what?''The Republic of Heaven.'
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'For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.'
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Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.
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You're lacking a human dimension of some sort if you're not interested in the arts.
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She said that all the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity. She and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed.
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I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
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The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and ahead with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into their poor starved eyes.
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If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.
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It should be a firmly established part of the curriculum that children should visit theatres and concert halls.