Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn’t sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I’m doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.
You don’t win races by wishing, you win them by running faster than everyone else does.
There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.
When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.
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’m with the Grimms on this: stories for young and old. You can’t characterize them any better than that.
I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.
My books are about killing God.
What I couldn’t help noticing was that I learned more about the novel in a morning by trying to write a page of one than I’d learned in seven years or so of trying to write criticism.
I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.
Once upon a time lasts forever.
A professional writer is someone who writes just as well when they’re not inspired as when they are.
You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
It’s only through honesty and courage that science can work at all. The Ptolemaic understanding of the solar system was undermined and corrected by the constant pressure of more and more honest reporting.
A lot of modernism does seem to come out of a fear of being thought an ordinary storyteller. So they tell it backwards and they tell it in the present tense and they cut loose the pages and shuffle them around – all that kind of stuff.
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.
Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current.
There is another consequence of any belief in a single god, and that is that it is a very good excuse for people to behave very badly.
There will be days when the stuff is not flowing freely. What you do then is MAKE IT UP!