Philip Pullman Long Quotations

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that's a high title to claim.

I’m just trying to wake up - I’m so afraid of sleeping all my life and then dying - I want to wake up first. I wouldn’t care if it was just for an hour, as long as I was properly alive and awake…

Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I'd follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can't spend them together, we... we'll have to spend them apart.

Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn't sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I'm doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.

Long before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.

It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.