Philip Pullman Quotes
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My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading 'proper' books, too.
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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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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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'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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The best sort of activity is one that combines mental effort with sensuous delight. That's why I love drawing.
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I don't like it when I see my books sold cheaply.
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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 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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The only instrument I play myself is the ukulele.
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'For a human being, nothing comes naturally,' said Grumman. 'We have to learn everything we do.'
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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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It should be a firmly established part of the curriculum that children should visit theatres and concert halls.
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You said I was a warrior. You told me that was my nature, and I shouldn’t argue with it. Father, you were wrong. I fought because I had to. I can’t choose my nature, but I can choose what I do. And I will choose, because now I'm free.
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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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Seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.
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One handy piece of equipment, which I recommend to any writer of fiction, is a set of Myriorama cards. I consult them frequently.
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Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet.
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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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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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My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing.
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If a nation allows its literary culture to die, it's a sign that it doesn't fundamentally care.
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Theatre is one of those things that children will love if they're helped to get there to see it. No child will find his or her own way to the theatre.
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Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.