Philip Pullman Stories Quotations

A 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.

All stories teach, whether the storyteller intends them to or not. They teach the world we create. They teach the morality we live by. They teach it much more effectively than moral precepts and instructions.

Just finished 'Secrecy' - truly enthralling both as a love story and as a tale of suspense - but much more than both.

Literary modernism kind of grew out of a sense that, "Oh my god! I'm telling a story! Oh, that can't be the case, because I'm a clever person. I'm a literary person! What am I going to do to distinguish myself? I know! I'll write Ulysses."

I'm with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can't characterize them any better than that.

I 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.

Disney is a huge presence when it comes to fairy tales because he's made of them such brilliant artifacts in terms of movie-making. But it's very hard to ignore what he's done to them.I'm not interested in denigrating Disney or even commenting on him very much. I'm more interested in seeing what I can do with the stories myself.

One of the ways in which writers most show their inventiveness is in the things they tell us about how they write. Generally speaking, I don't like to make a plan before I've written a story. I find it kills the story - deadens it, makes it uninteresting. Unless I'm surprised by something in a story, the reader's not going to be surprised either.

I wanted the chance to look again at very famous stories and see what made them work well, whether there were any ways in which they could be improved. Because the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales is that there is no authentic text.

The state of mind which I put myself when I tell a story is one in which superstition flourishes very easily. And I welcome that because it helps me.

I practiced on the greatest model of storytelling we've got, which is "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey." I told those stories many, many times.

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.

The way you speak of the characters in your story shows what you think of the values of conservatives‚ or evolution, for example. It shows where your moral center is. So you are in the message business whether you like it or not.

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.

Tell them stories. They need the truth you must tell them true stories, and everything will be well, just tell them stories.

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.

I am a story teller. If I wanted to send a message I would have written a sermon.