Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
Philip PullmanI don't profess any religion; I don't think it's possible that there is a God.... My books are about killing God.
Philip PullmanA story, to me, has a particular sprite, like the angel of the spirit of that story - and it's my job to attend to what it wants to do.
Philip PullmanI feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.
Philip Pullman