Quote

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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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
Alone
Cages
State
Tale
Alteration
Keep
Version
Alterations
States
Perpetual
Robins
Versions
Robin
Fairy
Translation
Tales
Translations
Becoming
Cage

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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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True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
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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.
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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.
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No one has the right to live without being shocked.
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Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
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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.
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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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I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.
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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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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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...because where we are is always the most important place.
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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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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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I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.
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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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The way you speak of the characters in your story shows what you think of the values of conservatives‚ or evolution, for example. It shows where your moral center is. So you are in the message business whether you like it or not.
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Marisa! Marisa!” The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra’s mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss.
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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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You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.
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