Philip Pullman Quotes

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

I’m trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief.

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!

My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading ‘proper‘ books, too.

The only instrument I play myself is the ukulele.

Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.

One handy piece of equipment, which I recommend to any writer of fiction, is a set of Myriorama cards. I consult them frequently.

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.

Possibly because I earn my living as a writer of fiction and possibly because it’s just the sensible thing to do, I like to pay attention to everything I come across, including things that evoke the uncanny or the mysterious.

I love all types of music – jazz, great pop music, world music and folk music – but the music I listen to most is piano music from the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Russian music in particular.

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.

I have maintained a passionate interest in education, which leads me occasionally to make foolish and ill-considered remarks alleging that not everything is well in our schools.

Theatre is one of those things that children will love if they’re helped to get there to see it. No child will find his or her own way to the theatre.

My only real claim to anyone‘s attention lies in my writing.

If a nation allows its literary culture to die, it’s a sign that it doesn’t fundamentally care.

One curious thing about growing up is that you don’t only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents’ and grandparents‘ lives come to you.

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.

Everyone in the book‘s ecology, starting with the author and including the publisher, the distributor, the booksellers, the libraries, and ending up with the reader, should benefit from a healthy book trade.

I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at and sometimes a bit lower to type.

That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

Every government secretary of state or minister should jolly well go to the theatre, go to a concert, go to an art gallery, go to a museum, become somehow interested in these things. If they’re not interested, they shouldn’t be in government, full stop.

It should be a firmly established part of the curriculum that children should visit theatres and concert halls.

Being in love was like China: you knew it was there, and no doubt it was very interesting, and some people went there, but I never would. I’d spend all my life without ever going to China, but it wouldn’t matter, because there was all the rest of the world to visit.

The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.

I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.