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The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.

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
Attention
Feast
Interest
Vampires
Less
Informed
Children
Vampire
World
Attractive
Conscious
Blood
Specters
Food
Immaturity

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I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: Nobody understands me and I'm the only genius in the world and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep.
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But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.
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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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There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.
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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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A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
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When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
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Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.
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Do not lie to the Scholar.
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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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There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.
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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'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.
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I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
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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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We have to learn everything we do.
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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.
Philip Pullman
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And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.
Philip Pullman
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And barely ten minutes later the soft sound of wingbeats came to their ears, and Balthamos stood up eagerly. The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion.
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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
Philip Pullman