If not a writer, "I'd be a commedia dell'arte actor."

Pullman's Favourite Books: "The Magic Pudding (Norman Lindsay), Tove Jansson's Moomin books, and TinTin books including The Castafiore Emerald and The Secret of the Unicorn. Also George Eliot's Middlemarch and Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds.

Pullman's Favourite Lines of Poetry: "The passage from Milton's Paradise Lost that describes Satan as he's flying:

"As when far off at Sea a Fleet descri'd
Hangs in the Clouds, by Equinoctal Winds
Close sailing from Bengala, or the Isles
Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring
Thir spicy Drugs: they on the Trading Flood
Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape
Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seem'd
Far off the flying Fiend."

In reference to His Dark Materials, "I said what I really wanted to do was Paradise Lost for teenagers."