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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

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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
Failure
Risk
Goes
Willing
Everything
Hard
Work
Despair
Something
Including

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.
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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
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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.
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That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
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If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.
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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.
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I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
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You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
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When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
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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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I don't profess any religion I don't think it's possible that there is a God.... My books are about killing God.
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I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.
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I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
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What is worth having is worth working for.
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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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Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
Philip Pullman
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No one has the right to live without being shocked.
Philip Pullman
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Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.
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Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.
Philip Pullman
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And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
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