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Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are.

Philip Pullman

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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
Devils
Devil
Friends
Tell

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
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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.
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One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.
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It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.
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A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
Philip Pullman
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The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it.
Philip Pullman
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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
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But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.
Philip Pullman
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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
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Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.
Philip Pullman
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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
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...because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
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As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms.
Philip Pullman
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I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
Philip Pullman
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Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup -- of everyone's psychological makeup.
Philip Pullman
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I know whom we must fight...it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse.That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.
Philip Pullman
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If you can't think of what to write, tough luck write anyway.
Philip Pullman
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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
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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
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For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
Philip Pullman