I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.
Philip PullmanLong before writing, people were telling each other stories and the audiobook goes all the way back to that tradition.
Philip PullmanGradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There's the rock-hard certainty of personal experience ("I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,"), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there's the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through maths, in the context of Pythagoras's theorem or something similar, and which, if we first encounter it at exactly the right moment, bursts on our minds like sunrise with the whole universe playing a great chord of C Major.
Philip Pullman