Philip Pullman on storytelling

Via the Hammock Papers comes this YouTube video of Philip Pullman delivering the 2018 Annual Lecture of the Blake Society.

It’s well worth a watch and, if anything, I found the Q&A more interesting than the talk itself.

Points of interest include this, on critics:

[27:38] – “There’s something a bit creepy about reviewers who enjoy destroying books. If someone’s written a bad book, ignore it, it seems to me. Pass it over in silence. Time will get rid of it soon enough. To use someone’s incompetence or lack of talent as a theme on which to write your own witty variance is inexcusable.”