Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.
Philip Pullman
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Philip Pullman
Age: 77
Born: 1946
Born: October 19
Audiobook Narrator
Executive Producer
Film Writer
Librarian
Novelist
Playwright
University Teacher
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
Sir Philip Pullman
Writer
Someone
Wells
Well
Writing
Writes
Professional
Inspired
More quotes by Philip Pullman
I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.
Philip Pullman
Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.
Philip Pullman
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
Philip Pullman
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.
Philip Pullman
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
The justice of it seems to children correct and right - I mean, we laugh at it! We underestimate children's ability to know what is a story and what isn't.
Philip Pullman
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
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
Philip Pullman
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
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.
Philip Pullman
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
Philip Pullman
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
Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
Philip Pullman
After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman
Both the Oblation Board and the Specters of Indifference are bewitched by this truth about human beings: that innocence is different from experience. The Oblation Board fears and hates Dust, and the Specters feast on it, but it's Dust both of them are obsessed by.
Philip Pullman
We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.
Philip Pullman
Symbols and emblems were everywhere. Buildings and pictures were designed to be read like books. Everything stood for something else if you had the right dictionary, you could read Nature itself. It was hardly surprising to find philosophers using the symbolism of their time to interpret knowledge that came from a mysterious source.
Philip Pullman
For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.
Philip Pullman
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
Looking at them now, thought Jim, you'd never believe they weren't in love with each other, and not with a hopeless, doomed obsession like poor Isabel Meredith. This was what love ought to be like: playful and passionate and teasing, and dangerous, too, with sharp intelligence in it.
Philip Pullman
