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 writing democracy
Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.
book reading writing
If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?
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.
teenage reading laughing
I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: "Nobody understands me" and "I'm the only genius in the world" and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep.
reading views years
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!
books feed genuine nourish satisfy truth
Books which satisfy us and feed us and nourish us have to have this substratum of genuine truth in them, ... And I don't see much of that in most fantasy.
answers bully fighting reasons response
Fighting isn't the right response to bullying-for adults. Adults have to find out what makes the bully the way he is and look for reasons and answers and understanding. That's an adult's responsibility.
alive central space watching
It's not like watching TV; it's not even like watching a film in a cinema. Everyone in that big space is alive and everyone is focussed on one central activity.
human learn
For a human being, nothing comes naturally. We have to learn everything we do.
absence christian doctrine object presence
It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue,
audience children experience fresh opera performed run simply theatre
The experience of being in the audience when a play or an opera is being performed is not simply passive. Children need to go to the theatre as much as they need to run about in the fresh air.
bang begin slap telling troubles whenever
And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?
adam calculate cannot eve imaginary imagined include minus square
Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.
adam calculate cannot eve god imaginary imagined include manners minus root square
Adam and Eve are like imaginary number, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.