Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I'd follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can't spend them together, we... we'll have to spend them apart.

Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women any important part in the story at all. Life is bigger and more interesting than The Lord of the Rings thinks it is.

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God.... My books are about killing God.

There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

I got a book token for Christmas and exchanged it for a book called A History of Art, and that book (which I still have-battered and falling to pieces) became more precious to me than any Bible.

We are all subject to the fates. But we must act as if we are not, or die of despair.