Quote

We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

Philip Pullman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Philip Pullman
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: October 19
Audiobook Narrator
Executive Producer
Film Writer
Librarian
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
Sir Philip Pullman
Upon
Thou
Book
Forgotten
Need
Soon
Needs
Silence
Time
Books
Wrongs
Forever
Shalt
Rights
Lists
Lasts
Tables

More quotes by Philip Pullman

Image
And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
Philip Pullman
Image
Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
Philip Pullman
Image
And barely ten minutes later the soft sound of wingbeats came to their ears, and Balthamos stood up eagerly. The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion.
Philip Pullman
Image
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman
Image
When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
Philip Pullman
Image
I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn’t any God at all and that physics was more interesting anyway. The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake, that’s all.
Philip Pullman
Image
I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.
Philip Pullman
Image
But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.
Philip Pullman
Image
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!
Philip Pullman
Image
I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
Philip Pullman
Image
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose
Philip Pullman
Image
For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence
Philip Pullman
Image
We have to learn everything we do.
Philip Pullman
Image
Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel.
Philip Pullman
Image
Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn't sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I'm doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.
Philip Pullman
Image
The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.
Philip Pullman
Image
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Philip Pullman
Image
The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
Philip Pullman
Image
There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
Philip Pullman
Image
A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman