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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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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
Ever
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Life
Single
Worry
Anyone
Hours
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Worrying

More quotes by Philip Pullman

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If a witch needs something, another witch will give it to her. If there is war to be fought, we don't consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not it is right to fight. Nor do we have any notion of honor. An insult to a bear is a deadly thing. To us...inconceivable. How could you insult a witch? What would it matter if you did?
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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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Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.
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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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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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The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
Philip Pullman
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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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Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
Philip Pullman
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All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
Philip Pullman
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True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
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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.
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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?
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Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.
Philip Pullman
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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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The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.
Philip Pullman
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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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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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Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
Philip Pullman
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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.
Philip Pullman
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What is worth having is worth working for.
Philip Pullman