Writers Write Is All About Writing
Writers Write Is All About Writing
Philip Pullman

Literary Birthday – 19 October – Philip Pullman

Happy Birthday, Philip Pullman, born 19 October 1946.

Philip Pullman’s Top 10 Writing Quotes

  1. Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.
  2. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
  3. 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.
  4. I am a storyteller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.
  5. There’s a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.
  6. As Jane Austen might have put it: It is a truth universally acknowledged that young protagonists in search of adventure must ditch their parents.
  7. I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
  8. Writer’s block is a condition that affects amateurs and people who aren’t serious about writing.
  9. I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
  10. 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.

Read: Philip Pullman: On Writer’s Block

Philip Pullman is an award-winning English novelist of speculative fiction. He is the author of many bestselling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust series, as well as the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Pullman is an atheist and embraces a humanistic morality. His works have been translated into many languages, and he was one of the best-known writers for children at the turn of the 21st century. His works have also been adapted for film and television. In 2001 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2018 Pullman’s non-fiction book about his approach to writing and storytelling, Dæmon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling, was released. He was knighted in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Source for Image: Photographed by Adrian Hon, http://mssv.net/, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philip_Pullman_2005-04-16.png

by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 19th October 2012
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