Quote

She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.

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
Brandy
Longed
Pistols
Verbs
Pencils
Coffee
Make
Life

More quotes by Philip Pullman

Image
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?
Philip Pullman
Image
When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
Philip Pullman
Image
There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.
Philip Pullman
Image
Thou Shalt Not is soon forgotten, but Once Upon a Time is forever.
Philip Pullman
Image
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
Philip Pullman
Image
One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.
Philip Pullman
Image
The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.
Philip Pullman
Image
Sticks and stones, I'll break yer bones, but names ain't worth a quarrel.
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
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
Image
We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of # libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
Philip Pullman
Image
I'm for open-mindedness and tolerance. I'm against any form of fanaticism, fundamentalism or zealotry, and this certainty of 'We have the truth.' The truth is far too large and complex. Nobody has the truth.
Philip Pullman
Image
I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
Philip Pullman
Image
Do not lie to the Scholar.
Philip Pullman
Image
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.
Philip Pullman
Image
What is worth having is worth working for.
Philip Pullman
Image
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.
Philip Pullman
Image
Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
Philip Pullman
Image
I don't see any sign of God in this world, in the place where we live and things we know. It can all be explained to my mind perfectly satisfactorily without God. But in the great darkness beyond this little spark of light where I live, of course there may be all kinds of things. There may be a god. So I'm really an agnostic.
Philip Pullman
Image
When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
Philip Pullman