Quote

Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel.

Philip Pullman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Quarrels
Sticks
Bones
Stones
Worth
Break
Names
Quarrel

More quotes by Philip Pullman

Image
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
Image
If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
No one has the right to live without being shocked.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
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!
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
Philip Pullman
Image
We have to learn everything we do.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Philip Pullman
Image
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