Home.

I’ve got into trouble for saying this; apparently, since what I write is labelled fantasy, I should be a champion of it. But I didn’t begin to write fantasy because I was a great reader of it, a lifelong fan of orcs and elves and made-up languages. In fact, if you're a devotee of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, I should warn you that I have some stern things to say about The Lord of the Rings later on. In my own case, I began writing His Dark Materials hesitantly, doubtfully, and it was a surprise, not altogether a flattering one, to find that my imagination was liberated when it found itself in a world where people have personal demons, and polar bears make armour, and spies three inches tall ride on dragonflies.

But liberated was exactly what it was. In fact (and it embarrasses me to admit it), I even felt that in some odd way I had come home. ‘This was where I was connected with all the things. that gave me strength; where the air I breathed was full of the scents I recognised and relished, where my feet were on soil where the bones of my ancestors were laid, and where the language I heard around me was the language I thought and spoke and dreamed in, and where manners and customs were familiar — you know everything I mean when I say the word home; well, this world was home, in a way that no other world that I’ve written about has ever been — not even late nineteenth-century London, which I know pretty well. It was more than home, actually. This caused me a great deal of surprise, as I say, and I felt taken aback. 

Sir Philip Pullman, from Daemon Voices: Essays on Storytelling