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
life believe names
I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.
jobs angel stories
A story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do.
change being-yourself life-changing
You cannot change what you are, only what you do.
growing-up moving grandparent
One curious thing about growing up is that you don't only move forward in time; you move backwards as well, as pieces of your parents' and grandparents' lives come to you.
true-love falling-in-love flower
True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.
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.
dark director exciting forward greatly ideas integrity maintain materials narrative project respects seeing welcome
I warmly welcome Anand Tucker as director of the first His Dark Materials film, ... He respects the integrity of the narrative and will maintain that integrity in the film-making process. His ideas are exciting and well thought out, and I greatly look forward to seeing the project go forward in his hands.
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.
mean his-dark-materials
Everything means something.
hurt believe simple
And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
cutting doe pages
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.
mean two tails
If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal. But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart.