It’s like having to make a choice: a blessing or a curse. The one thing you can’t do is choose neither.

The e-book revolution has made it very easy to pay writers a good deal less than what their work is worth. I do strongly believe that we writers ought to hold out for much better royalties.

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

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

I don't know where my ideas come from, but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

For every once upon a time there must be a story to follow, because if a story doesn't, something else will, and it might not be as harmless as a story.

Half a dozen brats turned with expressions of derision, and Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian daemons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound.