Interview, The New Yorker, Dec. 26, 2005 ]
Philip Pullman
Related You cant live champagne life,if you cant buy beer. I DONT KNOW People are not an interruption of our business. People are our business. A man's worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes. It is hard to look up to a leader who keeps his ear to the ground. The most wasted day of all is that in which we have not laughed. The more intelligent a man is, the more originality he discovers in men. Ordinary people see no diff... The intelligence is proved not by ease of learning, but by understanding what we learn. Communication is something so simple and difficult that we can never put it in simple words. Like threads of silver seen through crystal beads How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it. In everyone's heart stirs a great homesickness. That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it. Our wisdom comes usually from our experience, and our experience comes largely from our experience. One thing about the school of experience is that it will repeat the lesson if you flunk the first ti... To reprove small faults within due vehemence, is as absurd as if a man should take a great hammer to... Faith is like electricity. You can't see it, but you can see the light. Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it by the handle of anxiety, or by the handle of... Some families can trace their ancestors back three hundred years, but can't tell you where their chi... A recent survey was said to prove that the people we Americans most admire are our politicians and d... If a man defrauds you one time, he is a rascal; if he does it twice, you are a fool. Flattery looks like friendship, just like a wolf looks like a dog. Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admired when it ... Freedom also includes the right to mismanage your own affairs. Let your friends be the friends of your deliberate choice. The man who has strong opinions and always says what he thinks is courageous - and friendless. Friendship is love with understanding. So few people think. When we find one who really does, we call him a genius Your life can't go according to plan if you have no plan. Practicing the Golden Rule is not a sacrifice; it is an investment. Conversation is an exercise of the mind; gossip is merely an exercise of the tongue. An expert gossiper knows how much to leave out of a conversation To live so that you would not be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip, is to have li... Gossip is sometimes referred to as halitosis of the mind If you would attain greatness, think no little thoughts. We are born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy. People are changed, not by coercion or intimidation, but by example. Children are natural mimics; they act like their parents in spite of every effort to teach them good... The guilty catch themselves. Good habits are formed; bad habits we fall into. If happiness could be brought, few of us could pay the price. Happiness will never come to those who fail to appreciate what they already have. Happiness is in the heart, not in the circumstances. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. Hatred is a boomerang which is sure to hit you harder than the one at whom you throw it. Hate pollutes the mind. If we miraculously became the people we hate, how lovable we would find ourselves. To feel "fit as a fiddle" you must tone down your middle. Our health always seems much more valuable after we lose it. A patient going to a doctor for his first visit was asked, "And whom did you consult before coming t... "Oh," replied his patient, with no malice aforethought, "he told me to come and see you." It is impossible to make wisdom hereditary. Honesty is a question of right or wrong, not a matter of policy. It is a pleasure to give advice, humiliating to need it, normal to ignore it. It is almost impossible to smile on the outside without feeling better on the inside. Too many people confine their exercise to jumping to conclusions, running up bills, stretching the t... Imagination was given man to compensate for what he is not, and a sense of humor to console him for ... Humor - the perfect relationship of the parts to the whole. Our five senses are incomplete without the sixth - a sense of humor. "What made the deepest impression upon you?" inquired a friend one day of Lincoln, "when you stood i... It isn't easy for an idea to squeeze itself into a head filled with prejudice. Too many people run out of ideas long before they run out of words. Imagination is the pontoon bridge making way for the timid feet of reason. Practical observation commonly consists of collecting a few facts and loading them with guesses. Friendship is a living thing that lasts only as long as it is nourished with kindness, empathy and u... Having supplied them with names, omnipotence, justice, knowledge, Providence, - what are they? A good laugh is sunshine in a house. When you laugh, be sure to laugh at what people do and not at what people are. One look around us ought to show that all our arbitrary measures and bounds have been clamped on us ... No punishment of the unrighteous has ever been too severe in the eyes of the righteous. Why keep on enacting laws when we already have more than we can break. The best leader is the one who has the sense to surround himself with outstanding people and self-re... Advice is the only commodity on the market where the supply always exceeds the demand. Successful men follow the same advice they prescribe for others. You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea Old age may seem a long way off. But on the day it doesn't, it will be too late to do anything about... Age withers only the outside. Where ambition ends happiness begins. The best answer to answer to anger is silence. The size of a man is measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry. A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about. People who know the least always argue the most. If you look for the positive things in life; you will find them. What we are doing at the moment is more that just one thing added to the rest; it is a memoir. Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes The human mind must believe in something, so why not let it believe what it does believe. He that boasts of his own knowledge proclaims his ignorance It is better to live richly than to die rich. On his examination paper a boy wrote, "A natural death is where you die by yourself without a doctor... Many things are worse than defeat,and compromise with evil is one of them. Desire for security keeps littleness little and threatens the great with smallness. We cannot be too earnest, too persistent, too determined, about living superior to the herd-instinct... A college education never hurt anybody who was willing to learn after he got it. Shortchange your education now and you may be short of change the rest of your life. Mistakes are a great educator when one is honest enough to admit them and willing to learn from them Catch your people doing something right and let them know you appreciate it. Create the kind of climate in your organization where personal growth is expected, recognized and re... Enthusiasm is very good lubrication for the mind. Enthusiasm is that kindling spark which marks the difference between the leaders in every activity a... There are many roads to hate, but envy is the shortest of them all.
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Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in y... 
Being a practiced liar doesn't mean you have a powerful imagination. Many good liars have no imagina... 
You cannot change what you are, only what you do. 
I like those crisis moments - if you're on top of it and don't get pulled under by panic and... 
Oh, great. This is going to be like shooting baskets with Magic Johnson watching. 
Rural towns aren't always idyllic. It's easy to feel trapped and be aware of social hypocris... 
I don't like department stores. I had a chain of department stores back in 1994 which was Lewis&... 
I'm in the retail business, not the circus business. 
You are forced to have the best data capture, the best information, when you have goods in hundreds ... 
We're in a celebrity culture, and when I turn on the news today I hear about Lindsay Lohan, Tige... 
Either I will find a way, or I will make one. 
Be wise; soar not too high to fall; but stoop to rise. 
My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a v... 
Bullies are often people who are shy and can't make friends easily, so, as the theme of the movi... 
Undermining experience, embellishing experience, rearranging and enlarging experience into a species... 
Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion 
All this, and Heaven too! 
The hardship of living in a refugee camp made me psychologically strong. 
The important thing to recognize is that it takes a team, and the team ought to get credit for the w... 
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't ... 
Nor custom, nor example, nor cast numbers
Of such as do offend, make less the sin. 
A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an arm... 
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the bru... 
Just like those who are incurably ill, the aged know everything about their dying except exactly whe... 
The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few. 
Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the... 
All architects want to live beyond their deaths. 
Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survive... 
When in doubt, delete it. 
For we have thought the longer thoughts
It is better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same. 
Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal. 
I had always imagined that Clich? was a suburb of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxf... 