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"I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer."
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"If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be."
"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."
"It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself."
"To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation.If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives while you live, whereas the poems you write live without while."
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
"Part of my soul goes into each quote I write. A book of my quotes can be yours for just $19.99."
"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."
"There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out."
"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
Explore more quotes by Philip Pullman
"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."
"Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. 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."
"I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!"
"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."
"Seems to me-' Lee said, feeling for the words, 'seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed...."
"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."
"To be sure, there's a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you're doing what I always warned you agin: you're a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do... Don't you worry that John Faa's heart is too soft to strike a blow when the time comes. And the time will come under judgement. Not under passion."
"Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all, it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction."
"She delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her."
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