Philip Pullman Quotes

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

I believe in research you cannot do enough research; believability comes out of what's real.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

The highest praise is when a kid says, 'This book feels so real; this could have happened at my school.'

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

If the audience sees and feels things are real, then they buy it.

The only way to make a scene realistic is to do it the way you know it would really happen.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

Don't write about that which you don't know.

You could imagine writing about a prostitute, for instance, but if you haven't spent time with prostitutes then you're going to get all these details wrong. But if you have a lot of sex with prostitutes and you're friends with prostitutes and you interview prostitutes, then maybe after many, many years you might be able to create prostitute characters.

Everything in a story should be credible.

Everybody claims they have relatable, connectable characters, but those claims often aren't true.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.

I like to have the impression that whatever is happening is true.

True information does good.

I don't edit information, I follow it.

The measure of our [the Voice of America] success will be the degree to which we are believed.

Whenever I write something, I always want to make sure that what I write is defensible.

I need to know everything inside quote marks is true.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.

VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth)

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.