...when all the openings were closed, then the worlds would all be restored to their proper relations with one another, Lyraโs Oxford and Willโs would lie over each other again, like transparent images on two sheets of film being moved closer and closer until they mergedโalthough they would never truly touch.
Philip PullmanI had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
Philip PullmanThere 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.
Philip PullmanThere'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.
Philip PullmanI wanted to avoid what some modern tellers have done, quite legitimately, to make fairy tales more like novels and short stories, to characterize the heroes and the heroines much more than they are characterized in Grimm. I like the psychological flatness of them, the fact that they're more like masks than individuals.
Philip Pullman