Thought for the Day

"I am extremely lucky but colleagues of mine who 20 years ago would have been able to earn a living from writing and selling enough to libraries can't do that any more."

~ Philip Pullman, speaking in 2017

Thought for the Day

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

~ Philip Pullman

Thought for the Day

“From our positions as individual creators, whether of fiction or non-fiction, we authors see a landscape occupied by several large interests, some of them gathering profits in the billions, some of them displaying a questionable attitude to paying tax, some of them colonising the Internet with projects whose reach is limitless and whose attitude to creators’ rights is roughly that of the steamroller to the ant.

“It’s a daunting landscape, far more savage and hostile to the author than any we’ve seen before. But one thing hasn’t changed, which is the ignored, unacknowledged, but complete dependence of those great interests on us and on our talents and on the work we do in the quiet of our solitude. They have enormous financial and political power, but no creative power whatsoever. Whether we’re poets, historians, writers of cookery books, novelists, travel writers, that comes from us alone. We originate the material they exploit.”

~ Philip Pullman

Thought for the Day

Author Philip Pullman on his imagined Coat of Arms:

"A bird of the raven family with a diamond in her beak. This is the storyteller: storytellers always steal their stories, every story has been told before."

Thought for the Day

"Storytelling is one of the most important, most humane, most liberating and most democratic things that human beings can do."

~Philip Pullman, author