A Quote by Philip Pullman

The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile. — © Philip Pullman
The function of a book or a poem or a story is to delight, to enchant, to beguile.
Writing for children isn't easy. Kids will abandon a story that doesn't interest, enchant, delight, thrill, or terrify them. But when you can find a way into a young reader's imagination through something as simple as words on paper, well, there's nothing more satisfying.
I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
Say, what abridgement have you for this evening? What masque, what music? How shall we beguile The lazy time if not with some delight?
We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention
The poem is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts, the poem returns us to the very social function of art as such.
I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.
When I encountered "The Lady of Shallot" (to take a "for instance" allusion from the many in the book, this one from the "Etiology" section) it was still considered a "great poem." What does that poem - or rather a particular presentation of that poem (hey, admire this!) - do to a young woman?
When you enchant people, your goal is not to make money from them or to get them to do what you want, but to fill them with great delight.
A story ... has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
Too many writers think that all you need to do is write well-but that's only part of what a good book is. Above all, a good book tells a good story. Focus on the story first. Ask yourself, 'Will other people find this story so interesting that they will tell others about it?' Remember: A bestselling book usually follows a simple rule, 'It's a wonderful story, wonderfully told'; not, 'It's a wonderfully told story.'
Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Don’t you think every face tells its own story? Like a book? More like a poem. If you study it long enough, you’ll soon find its meaning.
The subject of the poem usually dictates the rhythm or the rhyme and its form. Sometimes, when you finish the poem and you think the poem is finished, the poem says, "You're not finished with me yet," and you have to go back and revise, and you may have another poem altogether. It has its own life to live.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
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