“Nobody writes a book. What you write every day is a piece of a book, a fragment, a scene.”

“It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.”

“I’m working on another Lyra book right now – it’s called The Book of Dust.“It’s going very well and it will be finished when I write the words ‘The End’.”

“If you can't think of what to write, tough luck; write anyway. If you can think of lots more when you've finished the three pages, don't write it; it'll be that much easier to get going next day. ”

“If for one minute you think you're better than a sixteen year old girl in a Green Day t-shirt, you are sorely mistaken. Remember the first time you went to a show and saw your favorite band. You wore their shirt, and sang every word. You didn't know anything about scene politics, haircuts, or what was cool. All you knew was that this music made you feel different from anyone you shared a locker with. Someone finally understood you. This is what music is about.”

“Bastards have pissed me off," Reed snarled, out of breath, as he backed into the open armory door. "They hit me in the face."Lang grabbed Reed's jaw, turned his face toward him. "It's just a scratch."It's just my fucking face," Reed sputtered. "It needs to look good on a book jacket when I write my memoirs someday.”

“one thing that I realized early on in thinking about this book, when I found, to my consternation, that I was writing a fantasy. I hadn't expected ever to write a fantasy, because I am not a great fantasy fan. But I realized that I could use the apparatus of fantasy to say things that I thought were true. Which was exactly what, I then realized, Milton had been doing with Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is not a story of people and some other people who've got wings. It's not one of those banal fantasies that just rely on somebody having magic and someone dropping a ring down a volcano. Paradise Lost is a great psychological novel that happens to be cast in the form of a fantasy, because the devils and the angels are, of course, embodiments of psychological states. The portrait of Satan, especially in the Temptation scene (I think it's in Book 9), is a magnificent piece of psychological storytelling.So it was possible to do, I realized, and with Milton as my encouragement, I launched into this book -- which I reluctantly accept has to be called a fantasy. Finding physical embodiments for things that were not themselves physical was one of the ways I approached what I wanted to say. But then, that's what we do with metaphor all the time. That's the way metaphor works. The way metaphor works is not the way allegory works. Allegory works because the author says, "This means so-and-so, that means such-and-such, and this can only be understood in such-and-such a way. If you don't understand it like this, the book won't work."It seems to me that some critics of mine, from the religious point of view, are treating my novel as if it were an allegory and they had the key to it. It is not an allegory, and they don't have the key to it, because there is no key apart from the sympathetic and open-minded understanding of the reader.”