Top 300 Philip Pullman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “A murderer was a worthy companion.”

— Philip Pullman

103. “She longed for cutlasses, pistols, and brandy; she had to make do with coffee, and pencils, and verbs.”

— Philip Pullman

104. “I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.”

— Philip Pullman

105. “That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

— Philip Pullman

106. “There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.”

— Philip Pullman

107. “I’m superstitious about the paper that I use, for example. I’ve written all my novels on a paper of a particular size with lines of a particular distance apart and with two holes in the paper for the folder clip.”

— Philip Pullman

108. “The world is a cruel place sometimes, and warm-hearted people do most of the good in it. And much of the time, they’re mocked and scorned for their pains.”

— Philip Pullman

109. “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.”

— Philip Pullman

110. “Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.”

— Philip Pullman

111. “When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed. At that moment all Will’s choices existed at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. He had to choose, after all.”

— Philip Pullman

112. “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

113. “For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that’s a high title to claim.”

— Philip Pullman

114. “For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn’t, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.”

— Philip Pullman

115. “I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.”

— Philip Pullman

116. “You are dead- what am I speaking to?”

— Philip Pullman

117. “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

118. “You don’t read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn’t work like that. What’s happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.”

— Philip Pullman

119. “Well, I have an idea, usually a visual image of some sort. A setting. A particular, I don’t know, urban scene, a particular time of day. Something that grips my imagination for some reason.”

— Philip Pullman

120. “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.”

— Philip Pullman

121. “There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP!”

— Philip Pullman

122. “How can knowing something be sinful?”

— Philip Pullman

123. “Asriel was a tall man with powerful shoulders, a fierce dark face, and eyes that seemed to flash and glitter with savage laughter. It was a face to be dominated by, or to fight: never a face to patronize or pity. All his movements were large and perfectly balanced, like those of a wild animal, and when he appeared in a room like this, he seemed a wild animal held in a cage too small for it.”

— Philip Pullman

124. “Your death taps you on the shoulder, or takes your hand, and says, ‘Come along o’ me, it’s time.”

— Philip Pullman

125. “Knowledge is like water: it always finds gaps to leak through. There are too many people, too many journals, too many places of learning, who already know something about it.”

— Philip Pullman

126. “It was nothing more than what it was.”

— Philip Pullman

127. “All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything.”

— Philip Pullman

128. “I have suffered enough.” “Oh, there is more suffering to come. We have a thousand years of experience in this Church of ours. We can draw out your suffering endlessly. Tell us about the child,” Mrs. Coulter said, and reached down to break one of the witch’s fingers. It snapped easily.”

— Philip Pullman

129. “A human being with no daemon was like someone without a face, or with their ribs laid open and their heart torn out; something unnatural and uncanny that belonged to the world of nightghasts, not the waking world of sense.”

— Philip Pullman

130. “When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.”

— Philip Pullman

131. “Where did this love come from? I don’t know; it came to me like a thief in the night, and now I love her so much my heart is bursting with it.”

— Philip Pullman

132. “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

133. “But think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations, you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it.”

— Philip Pullman

134. “Thou shalt not might’ reach the head but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart. Also: We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them.”

— Philip Pullman

135. “We can control the future, my boy, just as we wind up the mechanism in a clock. Say to yourself: I will win that race – I will come first – and you wind up the future like clockwork. The world has no choice but to obey! Can the hands of that old clock in the corner decide to stop? Can the spring in your watch decide to wind itself up and run backward? No! They have no choice. And nor has the future, once you have wound it up.”

— Philip Pullman

136. “Take the anchor, there. The first meaning of that is hope, because hope holds you fast like an anchor so you don’t give way.”

— Philip Pullman

137. “You won’t understand anything about the imagination until you realise that it’s not about making things up, it’s about perception.”

— Philip Pullman

138. “The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”

— Philip Pullman

139. “Corruption and envy and lust for power. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious probing curiousity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. You have never from your earliest years shown a shred of compassion for sympathy or kindness without calculating how it would return to your advantage. You have tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; you have betrayed and intrigued and gloried in your treachery. You are a cess-pit of moral filth.”

— Philip Pullman

140. “Lyra’s heart, revulsion struggled with compassion, and compassion won. She put her arms around the skinny little form to hold him safe.”

— Philip Pullman

141. “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.”

— Philip Pullman

142. “The powers of this world are very strong. Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current. Go well, Lyra; bless you, child, bless you. Keep your own counsel.”

— Philip Pullman

143. “It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous, and good can’t. Evil has nothing to stop it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’d have to become evil to do ’em.”

— Philip Pullman

144. “Had reason ever created a poem, or a symphony, or a painting? If rationality can’t see things like the secret commonwealth, it’s because rationality’s vision is limited. The secret commonwealth is there. We can’t see it with rationality any more than we can weigh something with a microscope: it’s the wrong sort of instrument. We need to imagine as well as measure...”

— Philip Pullman

145. “Stories aren’t made of language: they’re made of something else. A little earlier I said that stories were about life; perhaps they’re made of life.”

— Philip Pullman

146. “You might not have more courage, but you should be ashamed to show less.”

— Philip Pullman

147. “The Authority considers that conscious beings of every kind have become dangerously independent, so Metatron is going to intervene much more actively in human affairs.”

— Philip Pullman

148. “As for what it’s against – the story is against those who pervert and misuse religion, or any other kind of doctrine with a holy book and a priesthood and an apparatus of power that wields unchallengeable authority, in order to dominate and suppress human freedoms.”

— Philip Pullman

149. “We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. We.”

— Philip Pullman

150. “I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.”

— Philip Pullman