YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Pullman

lines on the record: 54
first: 2023-04-04
most recent: 2023-04-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No. Again, something I found very long time ago is that plans don't work. Plans restrict, they don't help. It's me anyway. It's probably not true for everyone. But what depresses me is when I see children told firmly as if it's a rule of nature that you must write a plan before you tell a story. And they're even told to spend 15 minutes on your plan and show your plan and then spend 45 minutes on the story. This is what they're told to do as if this is what the process is. Well, it isn't. It's much more fun to write without a plan. And then when you've got it finished, that's the time to make a plan'cause you see what you've got.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I write by hand because that's what works for me, and I found 50 years ago, I found that three pages a day, which is about a thousand words, is a reachable amount for me.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes there was a girl of sixteen called Nurhuda Awahabi. I was killed in the fire, and her friends and her teacher at school and other members of her family wanted to raise some money to pay for. Her to be commemorated in some way. So Alfred to name a character in the story Nura al Wahabi and there was an auction and it raised some money. So I was glad to be able to do that. This book was already written by the time that happened. So although she's going to appear in this book, it's only a fleeting part. She'll have a much bigger part in the last part of the trilogy. But I have I have named characters after people who paid some money to charity. It's actually quite, I don't mind doing that at all because as I said, either characters come with their names attached or they don't. And it's quite handy to have a name to give someone.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know why. I just always done that. When I'm trying out people's names, for example, there's a German professor in the book who's had about 15 different names. I think he's finally going to be Gottfried Brander. Names of odd, either they come at once or you have to fight with them. Lyra came at once, but Jorick Bernerson took a lot of struggle.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the notes which go through a number of different stages, I've got two different colours here. I've got sort of colour of your skirt and my socks.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's pretty well intact. That'll go pretty well intact into the final book. So, really, there are three piles of paper. They're the ones I cut out and don't use. There's the actual text.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chapter one. Would you like to hear the first chapter? Chapter 1, which I'm calling... Moonlight and bloodshed. Pantaliman, the demon of Lyrabellaqua, now called Lyra Silverton, lay along the window sill of Lyra's little study bedroom at St. Sophia's College, in a state as far from thought as he could get. He was aware of the cold draught from the ill fitting sash window, and aware of the warm yellow naphtha light on the table behind him, and of the scratching of Lyra's pen, and of the darkness outside. It was the cold and the dark he liked most just then. As he lay there, turning around to feel the cold air now on his back, now on his front, the desire to go outside became even stronger than his reluctance to speak to Lyra.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, when I take a new pad of paper Colour the top edge in, so that the paper is then consecrated to that particular book. I write in a ballpoint pen because you can put it down and pick it up again and you don't have to put the top on as you do with a fountain pen. I like writing with a fountain pen, but the problem is you do stop to think about what you're going to write next and then you have to decide whether to put the cap on which holds you up a bit. or whether not to put the cap on. But if you don't put the cap on, it dries up the ink. So it's all terribly complicated. So I use a bore”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And yes, at St. Sophia's College, which you won't find on a modern map of Oxford, but it's exactly where by some strange coincidence Lady Margaret Hall is. So we now see the consequences of what happened twenty years before when she was a baby and what happened ten years before when she had the adventure we read about in historic materials. It'll be interesting to see how people respond. I find it fascinating to write about her on the verge of adulthood.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it is. Dark materials trilogy. Yes. The Belle Sauvage, the first part of the book of Dust, was set roughly ten years before when Lyra was a baby, Lyra's the main character. What happened in La Belle Sauvage has had a long gestation, a long maturing, and it's going to come into full existence in this book, which will be called The Secret Commonwealth, which is set 10 years after his dark materials. Lyra will be 20 and an undergraduate at Oxford”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's about the test draft. I've been over it many, many times. It's been, I started writing it, goodness knows how many years here. It was finished in a sense before La Belle Savage was published, which was in 2017 or something. But I've been working on it non stop since then, cutting it, shortening it, tightening it, improving it, making things joined together, cutting bits out, doing all that stuff I've been at that for a long, long time.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's all there because I'm a citizen as well as a fantasist. I live in this real world which contains things like Brexit and monsters like Donald Trump. So I want to find a way of writing about it. I can't write about it directly because I wouldn't do it very well, but I can find analogies for it. I can find images and metaphors that seem to work.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you mentioned the Hiddler Youth. There was of course also the Soviet youth movement who were encouraged to spy on their parents, which I think is a terrible thing. It was quite well shown in Armando Yanuchi's film, The Death of Stalin. And I think that might have been in my mind when I was writing that passage, actually.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're up to a point I found myself labelled as a humanist. But I'm a little uneasy about that because it puts you into a definite camp and I want to be able to believe more things than that. So I've been sort of softly tiptoeing in my own direction. I'm very taken by an idea of the American neuroscientist David Eagleman, which he calls possibilianism. More things are possible than we think there are. And in fact, everything's possible. Some things are more likely than others, some things we know are true, some things we suspect probably aren't true, but possibilianism is I find a much richer way of looking at the world than deciding here and now that only scientific facts are true and everything else is nonsense.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a very good adaptation by Nicholas Wright. It was done for BBC Radio. It's been done as an audiobook with me reading it and actors doing the speaking parts. So it had a number of adaptations, so I wasn't worried about another one.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you have to yes, it doesn't do anything to the book. It's still there on the shelf, as somebody said, I can't remember who that was. If there was a law that said whenever there's an adaptation made of a novel, the novel had to be withdrawn burnt, it would be a different matter, but of course the book is still available, and it's our common experience, really, I think we've all grown up in a sinny culture, that if we go and see a film of a book we liked, we kind of half expect to be disappointed because it's going to be much shorter than the story, it's going to leave all these bits out, and she didn't look like that, and he'd never have said that, and they've changed the ending. So we understand what happens with adaptations. And it has had a number, but his dogmatic has been done a number. He's been done on the stage very well, on the stage of the National Theatre.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I realized anyway, I realized quite soon that the point of view had to be anchored somewhere. And that is actually the fundamental storytelling question.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's where it's going to stay. So it was poetry I wanted to write first, but I wrote, I always knew I was going to write a novel. So I bought a great big book. Sort of minute book, as they were called, the book that you record minutes of meetings in. And on the day after my final exams I sat down and wrote chapter one at the head of a page and started writing a novel and on that first page I discovered a bit of a sort of puzzle, a conundrum, an enigma. I hadn't come across before if I was describing what he's thinking, can I also go into her mind and say what she's thinking? Is it a little loud? Certainly would you do that? This basic little question about point of view must have been discussed at dozens of lectures, tutorials, seminars, whatever, and I just haven't”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have to say I'm in good company here. WHODON got a third class degree. He said it Evelyn War. So did John Peterman. What happened was I just go and I wasn't very good at it. I wasn't very good at writing critical essays. I wasn't very good at reading. I read what I find interesting and then sort of stopped when it became boring. And the idea is that you plug on and read everything from beginning to end and make notes on it and then write essays on it. I didn't care for that. that activity very much. And I did lots of other things. I played the guitar, I sang, I painted pictures, I fooled around.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, not them. They were very derivative. I mean the San Francisco Alan Ginsburg, Jack Kerowic. I fell for Ginsburg in a big way, having read Howell in the sixth form, and absolutely relished it. I loved it. So I read all the beats I read on the road and the Dharma bums by Karouak and Jagory Corsau and so on. And their kind of west coast freewheeling existentialism. We were all existentialists as well then, having gone through Jean-Paul Sartre and Colin Wilson. Colin Wilson was very big in those days. So it became obvious to me that there were more ways of thinking about the world than just the ways sanctified by the Church of England.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it's unspeakable He sends his son into battle to get all the glory when he could easily have squashed them all in the first place by doing something. The list of his crimes is awful and Milton shows them rather unaware of what he's doing because as Blake said he was of the devil's party without knowing it. That's the interesting thing.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“William Blake has an answer for that, of course, as he has an answer for most things. The reason Milton wrote, this is what he said, the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels in heaven and at liberty when he wrote of devils and hell, and he does because the hell passage is a much more interesting than the heaven. Blick goes on was because he was a true poet and of the devil's party without knowing it. And I just love that. So Milton was inspired by duty when he wrote the heaven parts, which are pretty tedious. And God is such an unpleasant character. Such an unpleasant character. In Paradise Lost, yeah. God the Father.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw it for sale and I couldn't resist it. It's kind of extravagant, but it is one of the most important books in my life.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's something to me now my skin is bristling. My heart's beating faster, which told me that something magic was going on. Of course, this is not the thing you talk about to anyone. I certainly couldn't have talked about it in the English class. So I did all the things we were supposed to do, you know, you analysed it and made all the picked up all the classical references, and so on and so forth. But the magic of it was inexplicable and untalkaboutable. But I absorbed the world of the poem, and then later when I read the whole thing at Oxford, it was one of the parts I enjoyed most.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For unlike most other discoveries this was actually happened in a lesson where it was supposed to happen. We did books one and two of Paradise Lost for A-level, English A-level. And the way Miss Jones used to do it was to have us read it aloud. Explanations came later. Start with came the sound of the pipe, and I think this was very wise and very sensible. And I remember reading one passage from book two as when far off a fleet described hangs in the air, hangs in the clouds, close sailing from Bengala and the Isles of Turnet and Tydor, whence merchants bring their spicy drugs, they on the trading flood through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape Ply stemming nightly toward the pole. So seemed far off the flying fiend and again I had that physical”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“along with the priest as he said it just for the pleasure of the language. So there was that and also because he was a wonderful storyteller, my grandfather. All his sermons were full of stories. Some of them made up, as I discovered, and some of them true and some of them Bible stories and some of them not. He was very fond of cowboy stories. Hiertha must have resonated with him too. So he was that figure for me. He was the father figure whom I didn't have in real life. And I thought he was everything, really.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because of my father's death and because my mother went to work in London, where she worked for the BBC actually, we spent a lot of time, my brother and I, in my grandfather's household in Drayton, near Norwich in Norfolk, where he was the local rector, rector of the local parish. A very old fashioned clergyman with a very simple faith. I don't mean he was a literal creationist No, not at all. He was too modern for that. But he thought there was the truth, and the church was right about it, and what the church, you know, all the church services, which was still conducted then in the language of Thomas Cranmer and the sixteen sixty two Book of Common Prayer, which I loved again for the same reason, because the sonorous phrases followed too much the devices and desires of her own hearts, that sort of thing. I sort of mouth.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so on. It's so evocative. Of course it's over the top, of course I think Kingsley Amy said was he joking Of this poem but no he wasn't joking. It's a wonderful poem for showing what you can do with the sounds of words and the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me, filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before so that notice still the beating of my heart I stood repeating'tis some visitor entreating entrance at my door it's wonderful.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think coincidences is a bit of a stretch. Yes. Well, again, I discovered the Raven and other poems by Poe. When I was before I was 10, and the Raven is such a strong poem, again rhythmically, the language is very distinct, couldn't be by anyone else once upon a midnight dreary as I pondered, weak and weary over many acquaintanious volume of forgotten lore. As I nodded nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not fancy necessarily stories I wanted to write books like the books I read. I loved ghost stories, I loved ghost stories and horror stories, so I wrote that sort of thing. And wherever we were allowed to write a story at school, because creative writing didn't exist then as a school subject. But once a term, my dear Miss Jones, the English teacher, let us write a story, so I revelled in that.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there we are, yes. But I think a lot of people who end up writing books and perhaps especially children's books had a missing parent in their life. Parents are the people you have to get rid of when you're writing a book about children because they spoil everything parents. You have to get them out of the way or just pretend they say yes, dear, of course you can go off camping for five weeks with your friends on that sinister little island in the middle of the bay where the smugglers. But anyway, we were dutifully sorry my brother and I, dutifully sad, but I can't say I felt a great deal because as I say he was always away. Then my mother married again, married another RF officer, another RF pilot, and he was the one who was supposed to Australia, so that's when we went there.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he wasn't at home very much, he was always away either abroad or somewhere else. He was a big man with an RAF mustache and cigarette perpetually in his hand and probably a pint of beer in the other. I'm describing someone rather like Nigel Farage now which horrifies me.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The insurgency, as they used to call it. Anyway, his plane crashed and he died. And not knowing what was I seven or something, I didn't know anything about the politics of it then. I had no idea what was happening except the daddy was a long way away fighting and he was killed. And I formed the idea, I don't know how. that he'd been shot down, you see, this was the sort of central myth of my childhood that my father had been shot down in his plane. And he was given the distinguished flying cross posthumously. And my mother and my brother and I went to Buckingham Palace to collect it from the Queen, which was a big, huge event for us. But we didn't really know him”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, my father was a pilot in the Royal Air Force, and he was involved at the time in the Mau Mau emergency. The RAF was involved in And it embarrasses me terribly to say this now he was involved in dropping bombs on people who had I don't know what they had, rifles, spears, gun”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a lot easier than getting up off my chair and going and finding things out. So that's why I don't write realism because it's so much of a bother to go and pester people and ask them questions. Some writers are very happy to do that, but I'm sort of shy about it. I don't want to waste people's time. So I'd much rather sit at home and make it up. It's easier. That's the truth.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I suppose it does. I suppose it does. They don't make a big thing of it, you know. And the other thing is I don't explain them when they turn up in the book. You have to find out for yourself by reading on what they do and how they're used and so on. It becomes clear.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the passage that really affected me was one halfway through. Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley, wet below the snow line, smelling of vegetation, with a running stream and a watermill beating the darkness, and I thought I nearly fainted. It was quite extraordinary, the effect that had on me, and I didn't know what it was until a year or two later when I discovered it. I couldn't account for it then, and I can only account for it now by using words like enchantment magic.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The journey of the Magi, and I didn't know what it was. What happened was that at my school there was a new teacher who taught us what did he teach religious education as it was then called. And he drew a map of the voyages of St. Paul on the blackboard and sent a copy of this into your book so we'll set down and copy it. And then the classroom door opened in came six big boys, really big boys, at least a year older than us with bristling moustaches and spots and dangling knuckles. They were really big tufts and I thought we didn't know what was going to come. Anyway, they went to the back of the classroom and he conducted them as if they were singing, but they were speaking. I never had anything like it. And it was it a poem it didn't rhyme. And as I listened to it, the words they had a physical effect on me. My skin bristled, my hair stood on end, my heart beat faster.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, you haven't. You killed it. You've tortured it to death. Poetry communicates before it's understood, I think, TS Elliot said that. And it is the rhythm, the sound of the words, something magic in it. And its apposite that Elliot said that because it was one of his poems that Again with something that entranced me I must have been twelve at that age.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's sort of back to the front. Most English poetry is iambic. But this was backwards. It was very distinctive and very, well, very pictorial and full of wonderful names and the evocation of snow and pine trees and lakes and that sort of thing. I just loved it. Without fully understanding it. But this is the thing about poetry. You don't have to understand it. And this is what I think a lot of teachers get wrong. They think that poetry is a fancy way of saying something that's really quite ordinary. And once you've translated into simple English, you've done the poem.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For one was Longfellow's Hiawatha, which I don't think anybody reads anymore, were we about to set off for Australia and I must have been what's eight then? As we left the flat in Battersea Billy to go down to the taxi which was going to take us to the ship, I took a book from the shelf. I don't know why I took that book, but it was the poems of Longfellow, of all weird things for a nature old to take. And I found Hiawatha. Now, the point about Hiawatha, as far as I was concerned, was again the wonderful language, the rhythm of the words. Hiawath Yes, I can't do it exactly word for word, but the point is that the rhythm is, let me get it right,”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So on. The rhythm is wonderful, isn't it? I mean, that's what you can do with prose, and I loved saying that to myself. I could sort of. Sort of read it because my mother had read it to me several times, and I sort of knew it almost by heart. And I remember sitting I was on board ship, I must have been about five, and gazing at that page and remembering the words and kindest associating them with the marks on the page, which gradually became sort of transparent and, you know.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, the just so stories are stories of origins, of course, made up stories of how things came about. And this one is about the kangaroo, and he was forced to run. He ran through the desert, he ran through the mountains, he ran through the salt pans, he ran through the reed beds, he ran through the blue gums, he ran through the spinifex, he ran till his front legs ached. He had to. Still ran dingo, yellow dog dingo, always hungry, grinning like a rat trap, never getting nearer, never getting farther, ran after kangaroo. He had to. Still ran kangaroo, old man kangaroo. He ran through the tie trees, he ran through the mulga, he ran through the long grass, he ran through the short grass, he ran through the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, he ran till his hind legs ached. He had to. Still ran dingo, yellow dog dingo, hungrier and hungrier, grinning like a horse collar, never getting nearer and never getting farther, and they came to the Walgong River.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was a keen listener to stories, and I remember having two books that I learned to read on, one was the first noddy book by Enid Blyton. I must have been five, and the other was Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. The Just So Stories made a particular impression on me because of the language, because of the wonderful way in which he tells a story, the astonishing I mean, can I read you? I was going to say,”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's my body'cause I remember the sensation of being seasick. And I remember the sensation of changing from a sort of rolling motion which you can put up with to the plunging and dipping motion which is much harder to cope with. And all that. And the smell of the persistent smell of diesel and cooked food that you get on a ship. And all that stuff, it's all very deeply in me.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“swimming pool and introduced to King Neptune and all the mermaids and the shape of the sea differs and the colour of the sea differs in the North Atlantic it's grey and around the Cape of Good Hope it's green and then you know when you cross the equator it's blue and the shape of the waves changes from sort of short choppy ones most uncomfortable in the Bay of Biscay to long long rolling ones”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I learned things about life on board a ship, which I actually loved because we had the run of the ship. It was a straightforward passenger line, a royal mail steamer or something doing an absolutely regular job carrying people back and forth. This was the days before mass air transport. I loved what happened when you visited a port because the motion of the ship changed, noise of the engines changed, the smell of the air changed because you could smell the vegetation. And then you went slowly into the port and you looked around at all these foreign houses all painted white or wherever it was, wherever you were. It was so exciting. Not least because when you arrive at a port, you're arriving in the heart of the city because the city grew around the port. So different from flying in a plane because airports are fifty miles outside the cities. So there's that. And there's also the ceremony of crossing the line, as they used to call it. I don't know if they still do it. When you cross the equator, you have to be initiated and ducked in the”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were in Wales from my eleventh year onwards, so I spent all my secondary schooling in Wales and North Wales, Harlech. But before that, because my father and then my stepfather were both on the RAF and The Royal Air Force, this was the end of empire, really. So there were still RF stations in southern Africa in Rhodesia as it was, southern Rhodesia. Australia. We let's say my mother and my younger brother and I sort of followed him out there. He travelled by sea in those days. I'd cross the equator four times by the time I was eleven.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Flower studied grassy plain outside Troy. So I learned what I could do and what I couldn't do. I also learned a bit about timing because if you keep your eye on the clock, you know the bell's going to go half past, and you work up to that very exciting bit when Achilles has just heard about the death of Patroclus, and he comes up unto the walls and looks out across the plain of Troy and the setting sun shines on him and everybody can see this golden head and they know what's going to happen next and then the bell goes. Oh, we don't want to go out. So, you know, that's sort of the thing you can learn about timing when you tell the story.”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right. I'd read it up the night before, get it into my head, and then stand and tell it. I thought it was better to tell than to read. And I enjoyed it enormously. I used to look forward to it as a highlight of my week, really, because I had three classes and I told the death of Patroclus or something three times every year for about twelve years. So I got to know those stories very well and I discovered what I could do as a storyteller. And what I couldn't do, I'm not very good at making people laugh. I can't do that. But I can make them keen to know what's going to happen next. And I'm not very good at the sort of domestic stuff. I couldn't tell a modern realistic story set in the world of today, but I can evoke a landscape which they haven't seen, such as the”
2023-04-04 · Intelligence Squared · Philip Pullman on Childhood and Fantasy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT