Pullman
I thought it would be hard to find an audience for this story, and I've been astonished and delighted by the reception it's had all over the world
The Science of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials"
Religion: The religious impulse – which includes the sense of awe and mystery we feel when we look at the universe, the urge to find a meaning and a purpose in our lives, our sense of moral kinship with other human beings – is part of being human, and I value it. I'd be a damn fool not to.
But organised religion is quite another thing. The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible god (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) – and done terrible damage. In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it.
That is the religion I hate, and I'm happy to be known as its enemy.
From time to time I have a new thought on the subject. When I come up with something worth writing down, I'll put it here.
on writing:
What qualities do you need to be a successful writer? Stubbornness, for a start. Pig-headed obstinacy. The capacity to sit still in front of an empty sheet of paper for hour upon hour and feel that your time is being valuably spent. Then I'd say an interest in the shapes of things. What shape is a story? Is a short story a different shape from a novel? What shape is a joke? Once you become interested in the structure of stories, you're well on the way.
The public doesn't know what it wants until it sees what you can offer. So follow the whole of your nature and write the book that only you can write, and see what happens.
The only duty [children’s literature] has is best expressed in the words of Dr Johnson: "The only aim of writing is to help the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."
To tell someone else how to read your book is to fall into the temptation of fundamentalism.
on education (the Isis lecture, April 2003):
Stories are written to beguile, to entertain, to amuse, to move, to enchant, to horrify, to delight, to anger, to make us wonder. They are not written so that we can make a fifty word summary of the whole plot, or find five synonyms for the descriptive words. That sort of thing would make you hate reading, and turn away from such a futile activity with disgust. In the words of Ruskin, it's "slaves' work, unredeemed.”
Those who design this sort of thing seem to have completely forgotten the true purpose of literature, the everyday, humble, generous intention that lies behind every book, every story, every poem: to delight or to console, to help us enjoy life or endure it. That's the true reason we should be giving books to children. The false reason is to make them analyse, review, comment and so on.
But they have to do it – day in, day out, hour after hour, this wretched system nags and pesters and buzzes at them, like a great bluebottle laden with pestilence. And then all the children have to do a test; and that's when things get worse.
... as we know, these days editors are lower in the hierarchy of publishing than accountants, and teachers are less important than those who set the tests. We have let the wrong people take charge. [my emphasis - lpd]
on telling stories :
Well, one doesn't want to be patriarchal, authoritarian, imperialist, etc, perish the thought; but this question has always interested me from a storytelling point of view, because the rejection of the central directing consciousness, of the omniscient narrator, is exactly what happened to literary fiction in the twentieth century, to its eventual impoverishment. Novelists became fascinated by other things than telling stories, and in the process, the feeling seemed to grow that there was something wrong about telling a story from a single, central directing consciousness, because that act involved a narrative voice, and narrators were now notoriously unreliable. So more and more literary fiction became tentative, diffident, uncertain, openly self-contradictory, uncommitted, shifting, relative … and story, which is both events and the voice that tells us about them, was banished. Where story went was into genre fiction – crime, romance, fantasy, and so on; and into children's books. And, incidentally, and increasingly, into non-fiction. You couldn't kill it; it's too healthy for that, and people have an insatiable appetite for knowing what happened next.
a culture of fear:
Shame on us, to be so timid. Shame on us, to be so mistrustful. Shame on us, to have so little faith in literature, in poetry and drama and story.
five steps we should take, starting right now:
- Do away with these incessant tests; they only tell you things you don't need to know, and make the children do things they don't need to do.
- Abolish the league tables, which are an abomination.
- Cut class sizes in every school in the country. No child should ever be in a class bigger than twenty.
- Make teaching a profession that the most gifted, the most imaginative, the most well-informed people will clamour to join; and make the job so rewarding that none of them will want to stop teaching until they drop.
- Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.
If we do those five things, we will not bring about a golden age, or an earthly paradise; there are more things wrong with the world than we can cure by changing a system of schooling. But if we get education right, it would show that we were being serious about living and thinking and understanding ourselves; it would show that we were paying our children the compliment of assuming that they were serious too; and it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time …”
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