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

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It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.
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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?
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When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
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A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do.
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So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.
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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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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.
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I look at the state of the American politics and I scratch my head in wonder. How can the Republican Party, any party, have fallen into to such a state of self-destructiveness - self-destructive stupidity? How is it possible? I don't know. It's an absolute mystery to me.
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And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
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Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.
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We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
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I don't profess any religion I don't think it's possible that there is a God.... My books are about killing God.
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The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.
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If you can't think of what to write, tough luck write anyway.
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After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
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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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Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
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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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When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
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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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