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

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She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
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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.
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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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Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.
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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.
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Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”
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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 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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For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence
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Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
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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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We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of # libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
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And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.
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For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.
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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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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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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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A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
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I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
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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