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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

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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
Tell
Interested
Next
Value
Happens
Consciousness
Stories
Books
Book
Story
Self
Values
Children
Read
Appalling
Writing
Force
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More quotes by Philip Pullman

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We need to ensure that children are not forced to waste their time on barren rubbish.
Philip Pullman
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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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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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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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'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart.
Philip Pullman
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Just sort of relax your mind and say yes, it does hurt, I know. Don't try and shut it out.
Philip Pullman
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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 am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
Philip Pullman
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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
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Lonely? I don't know. They tell me this is cold. I don't know what cold is, because I don't freeze. So I don't know what lonely means either. Bears are made to be solitary.
Philip Pullman
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All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
Philip Pullman
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...because where we are is always the most important place.
Philip Pullman
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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.
Philip Pullman
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I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
Philip Pullman
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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
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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.
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.
Philip Pullman
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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
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I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.
Philip Pullman