564 Quotes by philip pullman

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!

When you write a story you’re not trying to prove anything or demonstrate the merits of this case or the flaws in that. At its simplest, what you’re doing is making up some interesting events, putting them in the best order to show the connections between them and recounting them as clearly as you can.

A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around – all that kind of stuff.

Mrs. Coulter selected her lovers for their power and influence, but it did no harm if they were good-looking. Did she ever become fond of a lover? Not once. She could not keep her servants, either.

The narrating voice that tells ‘Middlemarch’ is just as much a made-up character as Dorothea or Mr. Casaubon.

Seems to me the place to fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.

He was liked when noticed, but not noticed much, and that did him no harm either.

He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren’t very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject – what a burden his life was.

You know the theorem of Pythagoras?” “The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” “That’s exactly it. And is that true for every example you’ve tried?” “Yes.