Quote

What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose

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
Writing
Verses
Good
Strict
Prose
Training
Possible
Write
Form
Best
Verse

More quotes by Philip Pullman

Image
But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.
Philip Pullman
Image
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Philip Pullman
Image
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
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
I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.
Philip Pullman
Image
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.
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
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
Image
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.
Philip Pullman
Image
You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
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?
Philip Pullman
Image
I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: Nobody understands me and I'm the only genius in the world and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
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.
Philip Pullman
Image
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
Image
I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
Philip Pullman
Image
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.
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
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