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We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.

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
Fates
Despair
Subject
Fate
Destiny
Subjects
Dies
Must

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.
Philip Pullman
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All good things pass away.
Philip Pullman
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I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Philip Pullman
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The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.
Philip Pullman
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Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.
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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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
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You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
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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I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is The Iliad and The Odyssey. I told those stories many, many times.
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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And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?
Philip Pullman
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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
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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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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
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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
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The way you speak of the characters in your story shows what you think of the values of conservatives‚ or evolution, for example. It shows where your moral center is. So you are in the message business whether you like it or not.
Philip Pullman
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I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.
Philip Pullman
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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.
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