Quote

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.

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
Language
Adult
Tolkien
Human
Rings
Codes
Humans
Code
Grownups
Work
Adults
Infantile
Way
Beings
Interact
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Fundamentally
Plans
Languages
Lord
Maps
Grownup

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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It's only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.
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For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
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When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
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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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But we can trust him Roger, I swear, she said with a final effort,Because he's Will.
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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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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.
Philip Pullman
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You don't read it in the sense of reading a message it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
Philip Pullman
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Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.
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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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We have to learn everything we do.
Philip Pullman
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After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman
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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.
Philip Pullman
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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?
Philip Pullman
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We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of # libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
Philip Pullman
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Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.
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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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.”
Philip Pullman
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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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I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.
Philip Pullman