Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman
Philip Pullman CBE, FRSLis an English writer. He is the author of several best-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. In 2008, The Times named Pullman one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945"...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionYoung Adult Author
Date of Birth19 October 1946
reading shadow attention
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.
writing stories way
One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.
beautiful girl distance
And then Serafina understood something for which the witches had no word: it was the idea of pilgrimage. She understood why these beings would wait for thousands of years and travel vast distances in order to be close to something important, and how they would feel differently for the rest of time, having been briefly in its presence. That was how these creatures looked now, these beautiful pilgrims of rarefied light, standing around the girl with the dirty-face and the tartan skirt and the boy with the wounded hand who was frowning in his sleep.
alive
You'll drift apart, it's true, but you'll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
book believe pay
The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.
growing-up scientist blank
You going to be a scientist when you grow up?” That sort of question deserved a blank stare, which it got.
numbers library civilized
We measure the value of a civilized society by the number of # libraries it opens, not the number it closes down.
maps way adults
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.
distance two use
I'm superstitious about the paper that I use, for example. I've written all my novels on a paper of a particular size with lines of a particular distance apart and with two holes in the paper for the folder clip.
becoming cages robins
The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.
thinking sticks terrible
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.
life-is-hard doubt spirit
And among academicians, and among spirits. I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, Mr. Scoresby, but we cling to it all the same.
stories done fairy-tale
Disney is a huge presence when it comes to fairy tales because he's made of them such brilliant artifacts in terms of movie-making. But it's very hard to ignore what he's done to them.I'm not interested in denigrating Disney or even commenting on him very much. I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with the stories myself.
writing inspired wells
A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.