Philip Pullman Quotes

Poetry is not a fancy way of giving you information; it’s an incantation. It is actually a magic spell. It changes things; it changes you.” An interview with Philip Pullman.

Dust is not a constant. There’s not a fixed quantity that has always been the same. Conscious beings make Dust — they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on. And if you help everyone else in your worlds to do that, by helping them to learn and understand about themselves and each other and the way everything works, and by showing them how to be kind instead of cruel, and patient instead of hasty, and cheerful instead of surly, and above all how to keep their minds open and free and curious…Then they will renew enough to replace what is lost through one window. So there could be one left open.

Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces towards each other.

It was nothing more than what it was.

This is a deep and uncomfortable paradox, which will not have escaped you: we can only defend democracy by being undemocratic.

Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.

You en't gyptian, Lyra. You might pass for gyptian with practice, but there's more to us than gyptian language. There's deeps in us and strong currents. We're water people all through, and you en't, you're a fire person. What you're most like is marsh fire, that's the place you have in the gyptian scheme. You got witch oil in your soul. Deceptive, that's what you are child.

Must is not the same as can, Lyra'.
'But if you must and you can, then there's no excuse!

Has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it?

swathed in an old tweed coat on which the damp had settled like a thousand tiny pearls.

But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know

We need to imagine as well as measure.

Then Lyra gave a cry so passionate that even in that muffled, mist-hung world it raised an echo, but of course it wasn’t an echo, it was the other part of her crying in turn from the land of the living as Lyra moved away into the land of the dead. “My heart, Will …” she groaned, and clung to him, her wet face contorted with pain. And thus the prophecy that the Master of Jordan College had made to the Librarian, that Lyra would make a great betrayal and it would hurt her terribly, was fulfilled.

I’m working on another Lyra book right now – it’s called The Book of Dust.

“It’s going very well and it will be finished when I write the words ‘The End’.

If you're going to make a living at this business - more importantly, if you're going to write anything that will last - you have to realise that a lot of the time, you're going to be writing without inspiration. The trick is to write just as well without it as with. Of course, you write less readily and fluently without it; but the interesting thing is to look at the private journals and letters of great writers and see how much of the time they just had to do without inspiration. Conrad, for example, groaned at the desperate emptiness of the pages he faced; and yet he managed to cover them. Amateurs think that if they were inspired all the time, they could be professionals. Professional know that if they relied on inspiration, they'd be amateurs.