Philip Pullman Quotes

I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

When I was 19 years old, I wrote my first book. I took a computer science class, and the book was garbage. I thought I could write a better one, so I did.

I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

I think one of the keys to better writing is releasing all of your ideas and to not be afraid. Dream big. This could be the greatest novel in the world you know.

I don't know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it's true. We aren't satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.

To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

All experience helps when you write.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.

Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.

Writing was something I have always been interested in. I've grown up in a household full of books, with both my parents English teachers and very booky.

Like most writers, I read deeply into the genre in which I write.

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story.

All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.

A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.

Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.

I had never written anything before in my life except maybe in high school when I wrote a short story, and my mother had to put an ending on that.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.