Quote

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would.

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
People
Knowing
Interesting
Visiting
Matter
Comparison
Never
China
Would
Travel
Love
Went
Like
Knew
World
Doubt

More quotes by Philip Pullman

Image
Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
Philip Pullman
Image
A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
Philip Pullman
Image
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed. At that moment all Will's choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.
Philip Pullman
Image
Life is hard . . . but we cling to it all the same
Philip Pullman
Image
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.
Philip Pullman
Image
Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.
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
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
Philip Pullman
Image
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?
Philip Pullman
Image
If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.
Philip Pullman
Image
One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.
Philip Pullman
Image
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
Image
For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
Philip Pullman
Image
But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.
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
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
Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but it's Dust both of them are obsessed by.
Philip Pullman
Image
He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?
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