Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.

I'm superstitious about the paper that I use, for example. I've written all my novels on a paper of a particular size with lines of a particular distance apart and with two holes in the paper for the folder clip.

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?

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

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