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A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around - all that kind of stuff.

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
Thought
Ordinary
Seems
Cutting
Shuffle
Doe
Seem
Modernism
Come
Present
Tense
Kind
Fear
Storyteller
Stuff
Loose
Tell
Backwards
Around
Pages

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All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.
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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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A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
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You don't read it in the sense of reading a message it doesn't work like that. What's happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
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Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.
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...because where we are is always the most important place.
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I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is The Iliad and The Odyssey. I told those stories many, many times.
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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.
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What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism
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When he'd sworn at her and been sworn at in return, they became great friends.
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When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.
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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.
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A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do.
Philip Pullman
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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 know whom we must fight...it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse.That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling.
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After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
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The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.
Philip Pullman
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Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
Philip Pullman
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He dared to do what men and women don't even dare to think. And look what he's done already: he's torn open the sky, he's opened the way to another world. Who else has ever done that? Who else could think of it?
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I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
Philip Pullman