564 Quotes by philip pullman

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.

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?

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.

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.

I don't see any sign of God in this world, in the place where we live and things we know. It can all be explained to my mind perfectly satisfactorily without God. But in the great darkness beyond this little spark of light where I live, of course there may be all kinds of things. There may be a god. So I'm really an agnostic.

For a human being, nothing comes naturally. We have to learn everything we do.

Half a dozen brats turned with expressions of derision, and Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian daemons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound.

It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue,

There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP!