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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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.

For that reason you can’t write with music playing, and anyone who says he can is either writing badly, or not listening to the music, or lying. You need to hear what you’re writing, and...

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.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing...

She found out that having something to do prevented you from feeling seasick, and that even a job like scrubbing a deck could be satisfying, if it was done in a seamanlike way. She was...

People should decide on the books’ meanings for themselves. They’ll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.

I don’t like rats any more than the next bloke, but they ain’t wicked and cruel like people can be. They’re just ratty in their habits.

It was such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. Everyone tested it when they were...

Everything has a meaning, if only we could read it.

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....

You speak of destiny as if it was fixed.

You are dead- what am I speaking to?

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they’d never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of...

When you live for many hundreds of years, you know that every opportunity will come again.

People are too complicated to have simple labels.

We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and dont’s. ‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever

It’s going very well and it will be finished when I write the words ‘The End’.