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.Collection: Book
Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.Collection: Needs
I think it's perfectly possible to explain how the universe came about without bringing God into it, but I don't know everything, and there may well be a God somewhere, hiding away. Actually, if he is keeping out of sight, it's because he's ashamed of his followers and all the cruelty and ignorance they're responsible for promoting in his name. If I were him, I'd want nothing to do with them.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.Collection: Alive
We feel cold, but we don't mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn't feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It's worth being cold for that.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Thinking
Marisa! Marisa!” The cry was torn from Lord Asriel, and with the snow leopard beside her, with a roaring in her ears, Lyra’s mother stood and found her footing and leapt with all her heart, to hurl herself against the angel and her daemon and her dying lover, and seize those beating wings, and bear them all down together into the abyss.Collection: Mother
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.Collection: Jobs
She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.Collection: Life
Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text. It's not like the text of Paradise Lost or James Joyce's Ulysses, and you have to adhere to that exact text.Collection: Paradise
You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.Collection: Fate
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.Collection: Love
If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.Collection: Writing
You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.Collection: Running
Everything means something.Collection: Mean
But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know.Collection: Knows
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. My main concern is that an over-emphasis on testing and league tables has led to a lack of time and freedom for a true, imaginative and humane engagement with literature.Collection: School
...because where we are is always the most important place.Collection: Important
All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?Collection: Block
My books are about killing God.Collection: Book
As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.Collection: Writing
Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.Collection: Writing
If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.Collection: Mean
On a cold, fretful afternoon in early October, 1872, a hansom cab drew up outside the offices of Lockhart and Selby, Shipping Agents, in the financial heart of London, and a young girl got out and paid the driver. She was a person of sixteen or so--alone, and uncommonly pretty. She was slender and pale, and dressed in mourning, with a black bonnet under which she tucked back a straying twist of blond hair that the wind had teased loose. She had unusually dark brown eyes for one so fair. Her name was Sally Lockhart; and within fifteen minutes, she was going to kill a man.Collection: Girl
But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it.Collection: Science
We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.Collection: Heaven
When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.Collection: Opportunity
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.Collection: Book
There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.Collection: People
Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, and clever.Collection: Beautiful
And think what worrying does: has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?Collection: Thinking
Life is hard . . . but we cling to it all the sameCollection: Life Is Hard
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 silenceCollection: Lying
We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.Collection: Other Worlds
She was riding a bear! And the Aurora was swaying above them in golden arcs and loops, and all around was the bitter Arctic cold and the immense silence of the North.Collection: Silence
Everyone, from the Mother Superior to the priests to my parents--they were so upset and reproachful...I felt as if something they all passionately believed in depended on me carrying on with something I didn't.Collection: Mother
People are too complicated to have simple labels.Collection: Simple
I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.Collection: Strong
She wondered whether there would ever come an hour in her life when she didn't think of him -- didn't speak to him in her head, didn't relive every moment they'd been together, didn't long for his voice and his hands and his love. She had never dreamed of what it would feel like to love someone so much; of all the things that had astonished her in her adventures, that was what astonished her the most. She thought the tenderness it left in her heart was like a bruise that would never go away, but she would cherish it forever.Collection: Heart
The book is second only to the wheel as the best piece of technology human beings have ever invented. A book symbolises the whole intellectual history of mankind; it's the greatest weapon ever devised in the war against stupidity.Collection: War
Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.Collection: Suspense
Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Stories
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!Collection: Reading
For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn’t, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.Collection: Stories
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.Collection: Reading