Philip Pullman Quotes about Writing

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

Read like a butterfly, write like a bee.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Writing is tyranny ... but reading is democracy.

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?

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

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.

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.”