Terry Pratchett quotes:

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  • Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

  • The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

  • I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

  • In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

  • The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?

  • You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

  • Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.

  • I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

  • That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?

  • There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

  • They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

  • There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.

  • It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.

  • I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.

  • You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

  • Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.

  • It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

  • I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.

  • I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.

  • Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'

  • I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.

  • By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

  • I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.

  • I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

  • I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

  • Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

  • There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

  • I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.

  • I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

  • Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

  • The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

  • The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.

  • No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

  • If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

  • In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.

  • I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?

  • My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.

  • Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

  • We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

  • Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.

  • I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.

  • When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

  • I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.

  • It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

  • Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

  • I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.

  • I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

  • Freedom without limits is just a word.

  • The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

  • Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.

  • The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

  • My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.

  • It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.

  • I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

  • I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

  • I like being a writer.

  • Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

  • I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'

  • I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.

  • I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.

  • I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.

  • Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.

  • It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

  • If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.

  • It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.

  • Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?

  • It is always useful to face an enemy who is prepared to die for his country, he read. This means that both you and he have exactly the same aim in mind.

  • Peace?' said Vetinari. 'Ah, yes, defined as period of time to allow for preparation for the next war.

  • It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus.

  • Anyway, why would you trust anything written down? She certainly didn't trust Mothers of Borogravia! and that was from the government. And if you couldn't trust the government, who could you trust?Very nearly everyone, come to think of it

  • Men marched away, Vimes. And men marched back. How glorious the battles would have been that they never had to fight!

  • Are we entirely ready, sir? said Lieutenant Hornett, with the special inflection that means We are not entirely ready, sir.We had better be. Glory awaits, gentlemen. In the words of General Tacticus, 'let us take history by the scrotum.' Of course, he was not a very honourable fighter.

  • Revenge is not redress. Revenge is a wheel, and it turns backwards.

  • The face you wear in a battlefield should be a solemn one until the time when things are cleaned up and the real world drips its way in.

  • Afterward, there was that long, crowded pause in which everyone decides that although they are very shaken, and possibly upside down, they are, to their surprise, still alive.

  • There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

  • Cohen looked at the forest of lances and pennants. Hundreds of thousands of men looked like quite a lot of men when you saw them close to.I suppose, he said, slowly, that none of you has got some amazing plan you've been keeping quiet about?We thought you had one, said Truckle.

  • Learning how not to do things is as hard as learning how to do them. Harder, maybe. There'd be a sight more frogs in this world if I didn't know how not to turn people into them. And big pink balloons, too.

  • We (people) only remembered that elves sang. But we forgot what they sang about.

  • They stole from rich merchants and temples and kings. They didn't steal from poor people; this was not because there was anything virtuous about poor people, it was simply because poor people had no money.

  • William: I'm sure we can all pull together, sir.Vetinari: Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.

  • It's a terrible thing for a man when his woman gangs up on him wi' a toad

  • She couldn't do any worse, but then, he couldn't do better. So maybe it balanced out.

  • Mort was hurt by this. It was one thing not to want to marry someone, but quite another to be told they didn't want to marry you.

  • Silverfish looked down."Oh. Are you a dwarf?"Cuddy gave him a blank stare."Are you a giant?" He said."Me? Of course not!""Ah. Then I must be a dwarf, yes.

  • Silverfish: "He disappeared a few years ago.""Disappeared? How? said Cuddy."We think," said Silverfish, leaning closer, "that he found a way of making himself invisible.""Really?""Because," said Silverfish, nodding conspiratorially, "no-one has seen him.

  • There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.

  • The Librarian liked being best man. You were allowed to kiss bridesmaids, and they weren't allowed to run away.

  • Bill Door was impressed. Miss Flitworth could actually give the word "revenue", which had two vowels and one diphthong, all the peremptoriness of the word "scum.

  • The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

  • I'm quite sure primitive people have no difficulties surviving in a place like this, and think of all the things we have that our rude forefathers lacked.

  • The footprints go this way," said Cuddy, "and then they return. But the ones coming back aren't so deep as the ones going. You can see they're later ones because they're over the top of the other ones. So he was heavier than he was coming back, yes?""Right," said DetritusSo that means...?""He lose weight?"

  • If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself."

  • Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying."

  • The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can you catch in one week?"

  • You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's all full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hang-in' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion."

  • Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that the often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all."

  • It takes an unusual man to make up a hymn in a hurry, but such a man was Captain Roberts. He knew every hymn in The Antique and Contemporary Hymn Book, and sang his way through them loudly and joyously when he was on watch, which had been one of the reasons for the mutiny."

  • Both parents passed away of the Gnats on their farm out in the wilds, sir, and he was raised by peas.' 'Surely you mean on peas, Mr Groat?' 'By peas, sir"

  • Right!""Right!""You can get there!""I can get there!""You're a natural at counting to two!""I'm a nat'ral at counting to two!""If you can count to two, you can count to anything!""If I can count to two, I can count to anything!""And then the world is your mollusc!""My mollusc! What's a mollusc?"

  • ... when your name is really and truly Percy Blakeney, pronounced 'Black-knee', and you still have bad acne in your twenties, you accept Pimple as a nickname and are grateful that it wasn't anything worse.

  • Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits.

  • I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.

  • It's the end game that people dread and that's what I'm scared of

  • Fantasy doesn't have to be fantastic. American writers in particular find this much harder to grasp. You need to have your feet on the ground as much as your head in the clouds. The cute dragon that sits on your shoulder also craps all down your back, but this makes it more interesting because it gives it an added dimension.

  • My dream holiday would be a) a ticket to Amsterdam b) immunity from prosecution and c) a baseball bat.

  • And gears," said Anathema. "My bike didn't have gears. I'm sure my bike didn't have gears." Crowley leaned over to the angel. "Oh lord, heal this bike," he whispered sarcastically. "I'm sorry, I just got carried away," hissed Aziraphale.

  • In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

  • People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school.

  • There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

  • Of course, Ankh-Morpork's citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed.

  • It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.

  • Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

  • The point is that descriptive writing is very rarely entirely accurate and during the reign of Olaf Quimby II as Patrician of Ankh-Morpork some legislation was passed in a determined attempt to ?put a stop to this sort of thing and introduce some honest.

  • When a man is tired of Ankh-Morpork, he is tired of ankle-deep slurry.

  • A number of religions in Ankh-Morpork still practiced human sacrifice, except that they didn't really need to practice any more because they had got so good at it.

  • I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.

  • He found that he had this sudden desperate longing for the fuming, smoky streets of Ankh-Morpork, which was always at its best in the spring, when the gummy sheen on the turbid waters of the Ankh River had a special iridescence and the eaves were full of birdsong, or at least birds coughing rhythmically

  • Technically, the city of Ankh-Morpork is a Tyranny, which is not always the same thing as a monarchy, and in fact even the post of Tyrant has been somewhat redefined by the incumbent, Lord Vetinari, as the only form of democracy that works. Everyone is entitled to vote, unless disqualified by reason of age or not being Lord Vetinari.

  • And we don't often get any wading birds in the River Ankh, mainly because the pollution would eat their legs away and anyway, it's easier for them to walk on the surface.

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