Life & Wisdom Quote by Philip Pullman

"And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?"

Philip Pullman, Writer

About this Quote

Pullman turns a craft headache into an existential one. The sentence lurches forward in a breathless, chatty tumble - "before I'd got to the end", "slap bang" - then hits the phrase "fundamental problem" like a curb. That pacing does what he is describing: storytelling as momentum suddenly arrested by a question you can't dodge. He frames it as something that "still troubles me today", a quiet flex that even a veteran novelist begins in uncertainty. The subtext is demystifying without trivializing: mastery doesn't eliminate the problem; it makes you more sensitive to it.

"Where am I telling it from?" sounds technical - point of view, distance, tense - but Pullman is also talking about moral position. In his fiction, especially the His Dark Materials universe, narration isn't a neutral camera; it's a set of choices about what can be known, what must be withheld, and whose reality gets to count. "Where" is geography, class, education, faith, species. It's also time: are we inside the child's astonishment, the adult's regret, the historian's cold summary?

Context matters: Pullman writes in a tradition (Auden to Milton to children's fantasy) that treats story as a vehicle for argument, not just entertainment. His line admits that the first paragraph isn't simply an opening; it's a contract. Pick the wrong vantage and the whole book tells on you. The irony is that the most basic question isn't "what happens?" but "from what angle does it become true?"

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Philip Pullman (born October 19, 1946) is a Writer from United Kingdom.

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