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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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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
Possible
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Worlds
Next
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Except
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Existence
More quotes by Philip Pullman
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.
Philip Pullman
A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
Philip Pullman
Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.
Philip Pullman
D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.
Philip Pullman
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
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
One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.
Philip Pullman
Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.
Philip Pullman
As for what it's against - the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms.
Philip Pullman
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.
Philip Pullman
You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
Philip Pullman
...because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.
Philip Pullman
People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.
Philip Pullman
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
It's not my business to remedy deaths! It's my business to tell stories. Lyra and the other heroines didn't come with placards saying, Make this a feminist story! I'm glad people enjoy seeing a female protagonist in a big adventure story, but I didn't do it for political reasons.
Philip Pullman
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.
Philip Pullman
Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
Philip Pullman
A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.
Philip Pullman
I don't profess any religion I don't think it's possible that there is a God.... My books are about killing God.
Philip Pullman