Philip Pullman

If there is a war to be fought, we don__ consider cost one of the factors in deciding whether or not to fight.

And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

I can__ bear the thought of oblivion, Asriel,_ she continued. __ooner anything than that. I used to think pain would be worse__o be tortured forever__ thought that must be worse . . . But as long as you were conscious, it would be better, wouldn__ it? Better than feeling nothing, just going into the dark, everything going out forever and ever?

when you're young you do think that things last forever unfortunately they don't Lyra.

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt. At one point, the old professor says, __t__ all in Plato_ _ meaning that the physical world we see around us is the crude, shabby, imperfect, second-rate copy of something much better. I want to emphasize the simple physical truth of things, the absolute primacy of the material life, rather than the spiritual or the afte

I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the

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.

One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don't exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.

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

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.

Lyra learns to her great cost that fantasy isn__ enough. She has been lying all her life, telling stories to people, making up fantasies, and suddenly she comes to a point where that__ not enough. All she can do is tell the truth. She tells the truth about her childhood, about the experiences she had in Oxford, and that is what saves her. True experience, not fantasy - reality, not lies - is what saves us in the end.

We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.

You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.

That__ 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.

If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.