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 English novelist. He is the author of several best-selling books, most notably the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials and the fictionalised biography of Jesus, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Philip_Pullman_2005-04-16.png

Photographed by Adrian Hon, http://mssv.net/, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 by Amanda Patterson

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Posted on: 19th October 2012
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