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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!

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
Three
Views
Passed
Something
Told
Basic
Years
System
British
Never
Study
English
Education
Entire
Literature
Importance
Culminating
Reading
View
Oxford
Point
Fiction
Studying

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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.
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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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I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
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We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
Philip Pullman
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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.
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When it comes to telling children stories, they don’t need simple language. They need beautiful language.
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If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?
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The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.
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I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.
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Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would.
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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.
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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.
Philip Pullman
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We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.
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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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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.
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But we can trust him Roger, I swear, she said with a final effort,Because he's Will.
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What is worth having is worth working for.
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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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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
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I'm perfectly happy about being superstitious and atheistic.
Philip Pullman