- Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn't be human beings at all.
- [his reply to the question "what do you do about writer's block?"] "I don't believe in it. All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?"
- Accepting the Carnegie Medal in 1996: "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 ... We don't need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. 'Thou shalt not' is soon forgotten, but 'Once upon a time' lasts forever."
- [on the "Dark Materials" Trilogy] I think what I would say to the people who criticise me for besmirching their religion and telling children that they should all go out and be Satanists is simply this. What qualities in human beings does the story celebrate and what qualities does it condemn? And an honest reading of the story would have to admit that the qualities that the story celebrates and praises are love, kindness, tolerance, courage, open-heartedness; and the qualities that the story condemns are cruelty, intolerance, zealotry, fanaticism. Well who could quarrel with that?
- We need joy, we need a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we need a connection with the universe, we need all the things the Kingdom of Heaven used to promise us but failed to deliver.
- This recent Doctor Who (2005), since Russell T. Davies came back and started having a hand in it, has been wonderful. I've really enjoyed it. David Tennant is terrific. Billie Piper was wonderful as Rose.
- So I'm caught between the words 'atheistic' and 'agnostic'. I've got no evidence whatever for believing in a God. But I know that all the things I do know are very small compared with the things that I don't know. So maybe there is a God out there. All I know is that if there is, he hasn't shown himself on earth.
- [Neil] Gaiman has a rich imagination... and an ability to tackle large themes.
- [on the conclusion of the "Dark Materials" Trilogy] The God who dies is the God of burners of heretics, the hangers of witches, the persecutors of Jews, the officials who recently flogged that poor girl in Nigeria for having been forced to have sex - all these people claim to know with absolute certainty that their God wants them to do these things. Well, I take them at their word, and I say in response...that God needs to die.
- [in 2019] There comes a point in the history of a nation where stupidity is indistinguishable from wickedness. That's where we are now.
- Of course Meghan Markle is attacked by the British press because she's black, and of course Prince Harry is right to defend her. What a foul country this is.
- The duty of the old is to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.
- Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagination at all; it's that which gives their lies such wide-eyed conviction.
- Human beings can't see anything without wanting to destroy it. That's original sin.
- We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair.
- For a human being, nothing comes naturally. We have to learn everything we do.
- There's more stuff out there in the universe than we can see. That's the point.
- I found folly everywhere, but there were grains of wisdom in every stream of it. No doubt there was much more wisdom that I failed to recognize. Life is hard, but we cling to it all the same.
- It does not make sense. It cannot exist. It's impossible, and if it isn't impossible, it's irrelevant, and if it isn't either of those things, it's embarrassing.
- Argue with anything else, but don't argue with your own nature.
- I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you might say, I'll always be thinking about it. And if I do end up doing that, I'll be resentful because it'll feel as if I didn't have a choice, and if I don't do it, I'll feel guilty because I should. Whatever I do, I will choose it, no one else.
- 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. At the moment all choices exist at once. But to keep them all in existence meant doing nothing. You have to choose, after all.
- I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed because it helps someone, or that's an evil one because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels.
- We have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.
- We shouldn't live as if the Kingdom of Heaven mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place.
- I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching a novel is 'Read like a butterfly, write like a bee', and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers.
- I'm trying to write a book about what it means to be human, to grow up, to suffer and learn. My quarrel with much (not all) fantasy is it has this marvelous toolbox and does nothing with it except construct shoot-'em-up games. Why shouldn't a work of fantasy be as truthful and profound about becoming an adult human being as the work of George Eliot or Jane Austen?
- Seems to me the place you fight cruelty is where you find it, and the place you give help is where you see it needed.
- Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.
- If you're going to make a living at this business - more importantly, if you're going to write anything that will last - you have to realize that a lot of the time, you're going to be writing without inspiration. The trick is to write just as well without it as with. Of course, you write less readily and fluently without it; but the interesting thing is to look at the private journals and letters of great writers and see how much of the time they just had to do without inspiration.
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