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

Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious impulse, and it is part of our psychological makeup — of everyone’s...

Lee was too cool by nature to rage at fate; his manner was to raise an eyebrow and greet it laconically.

And Will knew what it was to see his dæmon. As she flew down to the sand, he felt his heart tighten and release in a way he never forgot. Sixty years and more would go by, and as an old man he would still feel some sensations as bright and fresh as ever: Lyra’s...

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.

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.

It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America...

A graduate of Oxford University with a degree in

Books which satisfy us and feed us and nourish us have to have this substratum of genuine truth in them, … And I don’t see much of that in most fantasy.

Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all...

There’s been terrible things we seen, en’t there? And more a coming, more’n likely. So I think I’d rather not know what’s in the future. I’ll stick to the present.

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one… If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

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.

Lord, if I thought you were listening, I’d pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws....

But suppose your dæmon settles in a shape you don’t like?Well, then, you’re discontented, en’t you? There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a dæmon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste...

Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually wracked with pain.

Walk Into the Sky.

I think there’s a difference between (a) offending people for its own sake, which I don’t necessarily want to do, because some people are good and decent and it would be unkind to upset them simply to indulge my own self-importance, and (b) challenging their prejudices, their preconceptions, or their comfortable assumptions. I’m very happy...

she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her.

A few minutes after he arrived, Lee was talking to a group of astronomers eager to learn what news he could bring them, for there are few natural philosophers as frustrated as astronomers in a fog.

I warmly welcome Anand Tucker as director of the first His Dark Materials film, … He respects the integrity of the narrative and will maintain that integrity in the film-making process. His ideas are exciting and well thought out, and I greatly look forward to seeing the project go forward in his hands.

and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were...

For a human being, nothing comes naturally,’ said Grumman. ‘We have to learn everything we do.

I shall decide what I do. If you say my work is fighting, or healing, or exploring, or whatever you say, I’ll always be thinking about it, and if I end up doing that, I’ll feel resentful because it’ll feel as I didn’t have a choice, and if I don’t do it, I’ll feel guilty...

And before I’d got to the end of the first paragraph, I’d come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it’s this: where am I telling it from?

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

Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want...

I stopped believing there was a power of good and a power of evil that were outside us. And I came to believe that good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are.

All she knew was that she must be in love with someone, or she wouldn’t feel so miserable.

Argue with anything else, but don’t argue with your own nature.

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.

We feel cold, but we don’t mind it, because we will not come to harm. And if we wrapped up against the cold, we wouldn’t feel other things, like the bright tingle of the stars, or the music of the aurora, or best of all the silky feeling of moonlight on our skin. It’s worth...

The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vise intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don’t know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the...

Adam and Eve are like imaginary number, like the square root of minus one… If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

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

But Balthamos couldn’t tell; he only knew that half his heart had been extinguished. He couldn’t keep still: he flew up again, scouring the sky as if to seek out Baruch in this cloud or that, calling, crying, calling; and then he’d be overcome with guilt, and fly down to urge Will to hide and...

I will love you forever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again . . .

For a long time I thought I was a poet, but that’s a high title to claim.

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.

Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Who are you?” the woman said at last.”Lyra Silver—””No, where d’you come from? What are you? How do you know things like this?” Wearily Lyra sighed; she had forgotten how roundabout Scholars could be. It was difficult to tell them the truth when a lie would have been so much easier for them to understand.

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?

Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it’s dangerous. We’re more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right.

And 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.

One moment several things are possible, the next moment only one happens, and the rest don’t exist. Except that other worlds have sprung into being, on which the did happen.

When you look at organized religion of whatever sort whether it’s Christianity in all its variants, or whether it’s Islam or some forms of extreme Hinduism wherever you see organized religion and priesthoods and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression. It’s almost a universal law.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even human – they’re sprites.

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.

Tell them stories.