“The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you’re better off not touching it until you’re all grown up. I’m going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don’t open it.”

“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.”

“The fate of Susan Pevensie indicates some sort of crazed, deranged Manichaeism. Here’s a simple test: What is the greatest Christian virtue? Well, it’s charity, isn’t it? It's love. If somebody who knew nothing about Christian doctrine, and who had been told that Lewis was a great Christian teacher, read all the way through those books, would he get that message? No.”

“There's a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we're even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won't supply them.”

“I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever 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’.”

“This is the thing that takes me longest of all when I'm beginning a novel, to work out what the limits are, what the powers of the narrator will be, what is the appropriate tone to take. And where do I see things from: am I watching this, as it were, from stage right or stage left? That makes a difference. Mike Alfreds is an English director who has a company called Shared Experience. They do a lot of adaptations of novels. He's discovered that when they use a narrator, if they put the narrator stage right, the audience perceives the narrator as being somehow involved, warm, part of what's going on. If he puts the narrator stage left, the audience feels the narrator to be critical, detached....Ever since then, I have to say, whenever I do a conversation with someone on the stage, I take care to be stage right. But that's an aspect of where you're seeing it from, you see, whether the narrator is viewing the characters, as it were, sympathetically or, as it were, critically. This takes a while to discover for each book.”