Philip Pullman Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Ideas, Going Away

  Philip Pullman (2017). “Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling”, p.226, David Fickling Books

• After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

  Philip Pullman

  Book, Writing, Mind

• This is the value for me of writing books that children read. Children aren't interested in your appalling self-consciousness. They want to know what happens next. They force you to tell a story.

  Philip Pullman

  Children, Book, Writing

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2012.

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

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Long, People

• I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human - they're sprites.

  Philip Pullman

  Wise, Silly, Writing

• All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

  Philip Pullman

  Block, Writing, Doctors

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

• If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Thinking, Luck

• As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Adventure, Parent

• I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

  Philip Pullman

  Strong, Writing, Authority

• I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Stories, Messages

• If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Thinking, Next Day

• Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Butterfly, Bees

  Philip Pullman (2007). “The Amber Spyglass”, Knopf Books for Young Readers

• 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?

  Philip Pullman

  Book, Reading, Writing

• What I couldn't help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I'd learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism

  Philip Pullman

  Morning, Writing, Years

• What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Training, Form

• My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years... I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up.

  Philip Pullman

  Mother, Growing Up, Couple

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November 2012.

• My only real claim to anyone's attention lies in my writing

  Philip Pullman

  Real, Lying, Writing

• Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, “Oh my god! I’m telling a story! Oh, that can’t be the case, because I’m a clever person. I’m a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I’ll write Ulysses.”

  Philip Pullman

  Clever, Writing, Stories

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November 2012.

• For that reason you can't write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you're writing, and for that you need silence

  Philip Pullman

  Lying, Writing, Silence

• One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Stories, Way

  "His Grimm Materials: A Conversation With Philip Pullman". Interview with Michael Mechanic, www.motherjones.com. November/December 2012.

• A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they're not inspired as when they are.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Inspired, Wells

• Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.

  Philip Pullman

  Reading, Writing, Democracy

• If you want to write anything that works, you have to go with the grain of your talent, not against it. If your talent is inert and sullen in the face of business or politics...but takes fire at the thought of ghosts and vampires and witches and demons then feed the flames, feed the flames.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Fire, Flames

• There is time, and there is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God.

  Philip Pullman

  Writing, Should Have, Truth Is

  Philip Pullman (2009). “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ”, p.45, Canongate Books

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