Philip Pullman Quotes

I'm very comfortable writing in the first person; it dives into the character in a way that's difficult if you're writing in the third person.

I'm not sure that all books aren't that way. I think that might apply to any book I was writing. The book was kind of the product of this enormous infatuation I had, not only with the office and office politics, but with perspective, and trying to tell a story from as wide a range of perspectives as you possibly can. I tried to capture it all with the first-person plural, but once I settled on that, I used it to tell the story from as many angles as I could. I guess, to put it romantically, it was about a love affair with the craft of perspective.

It's harder to write in the third person but the advantage is you move around better.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

I like to think that I am telling a story rather than writing it.

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

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 view in fiction!

A lot of people consider my books to be straightforward, but I think that I write from atmosphere to atmosphere rather than from event to event.

I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn-that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you're a lot more likely to find one of the latter than the former your first time through the tale.

The way that I see third person is it's actually first person. Writing for me is all voice work. Third person narrative is just as character-driven as first person narrative for me in terms of a voice. I don't write very much in third person.

My first attempt at writing was very unstructured and formless, with shifting points of view. I was trying to understand how long form might work, and I realized I had something shapeless. It was a total car wreck. But I still felt I could pull it off. So I ditched that attempt and started writing in the opposite manner, in first person, with a driving narrative.

One of the most difficult things in writing a novel or anything at all is to choose the point of view from which it's going to be told.

Like stories, people have individual lives, and are all caught up in this murky thing. All of them have the best intentions. In that sense, you could just as easily tell the same story from another character's perspective. Maybe that's a good idea for a TV series.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

I love writing in first person more than third. I have to basically suspend my own world. I don't exist. I'm just a conduit. So I can be eight years old. I can be the mother of a kid that you find out certain things I'm not going to say.

It doesn't matter to me whether I write in a man's voice or a woman's, or first or third person for that matter. Those choices come down to the story and I just go with it.

When I write fiction, I create characters whose views are not my own, and I allow them to be eloquent in defense of their, not my, views.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

You know, writer can write about the Foreign Legion without ever having been in the Foreign Legion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that what he's written doesn't necessarily reflect the nature of him as an individual - or her. Using the male gender because it's me speaking. I don't mean to put down the female.

I don't know how to write a children's book.

I'm surprised how often I'm asked about being a man with a woman narrator. I'm not the first, nor will I be the last. It's been done forever, but we seem to forget that. The whole notion of "write what you know" is not just boring, but wrong. Lately it seems like every novel has to be a memoir. I'm a boring person, but I'm a writer with a relatively vivid imagination. And when people ask me about how I find the voice of a woman, I tell them that my life is run by women.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.

I think I was probably able to flip characters in my head as if I was playing different roles in order to write the different people because you kind of have to be one person, and inhabit him and write from his voice and be her and write her voice. So I think that helped.