Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman

"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
57 Quotes
"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
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
"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."
Philip Pullman
"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."
Philip Pullman The Golden Compass
"We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
Philip Pullman
"There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present."
Philip Pullman The Golden Compass
"The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing."
Philip Pullman His Dark Materials - The Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass
"“Lyra had never seen such a sight, never heard such a bellow; it was like a mountain laughing.”"
Philip Pullman The Golden Compass
"It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on."
Philip Pullman
"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 The Golden Compass
"I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.[Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001]"
Philip Pullman
"“People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.”"
Philip Pullman His Dark Materials - The Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass
"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 His Dark Materials
"When you look at what C. S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, ‘It’s all in Plato’ — meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afterlife.[The New York Times interview, 2000]"
Philip Pullman
"“Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We're more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.”"
Philip Pullman The Amber Spyglass
"“When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don't take are snuffed out like candles, as if they'd never existed.”"
Philip Pullman The Amber Spyglass
"We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of Libraries it opens, not the number it closes down."
Philip Pullman
"You are dead- what am I speaking to?"
Philip Pullman
"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
Philip Pullman
"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."
Philip Pullman
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