Philip Pullman

You cannot change what you are, only what you do.

We shouldn't live as if [other worlds] mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.

If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.

We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

There'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.

You don't win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.

I don't profess any religion; I don't think it’s possible that there is a God; I have the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ‘spiritual’ or ‘spirituality.'[Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005]

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

That’s the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.