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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
Whether
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Stories
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Storyteller
Much
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World
Morality
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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!
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If you can't think of what to write, tough luck write anyway.
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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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'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart.
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Marisa! Marisa!” The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra’s mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss.
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...when all the openings were closed, then the worlds would all be restored to their proper relations with one another, Lyra’s Oxford and Will’s would lie over each other again, like transparent images on two sheets of film being moved closer and closer until they merged–although they would never truly touch.
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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.
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When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
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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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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.
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Life is hard . . . but we cling to it all the same
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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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Tell him, we are not devils but we have friends who are.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?
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What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism
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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