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All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

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
Stories
Effectively
Live
Storyteller
Much
Instruction
World
Morality
Create
Teach
Intends
Moral
Precepts
Whether
Instructions

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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.
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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.
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It's not my business to remedy deaths! It's my business to tell stories. Lyra and the other heroines didn't come with placards saying, Make this a feminist story! I'm glad people enjoy seeing a female protagonist in a big adventure story, but I didn't do it for political reasons.
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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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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
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Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.
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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.
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The Lord of the Rings' is fundamentally an infantile work. Tolkien is not interested in the way grownup, adult human beings interact with each other. He's interested in maps and plans and languages and codes.
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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.
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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.
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Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.
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And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
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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.
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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 professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
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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.
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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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No one has the right to live without being shocked.
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Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”
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A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do.
Philip Pullman