Top 75 Terry Pratchett Quotes

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

‘Nation’ was one that I’d have killed myself if I hadn’t written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I’d lay my cards down on that, and say that it’s that that I’m trying to do.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

I mean, I wouldn’t pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I’m me.

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.

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.

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

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.

Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.

I’ve got wide tastes, but I don’t like jazz.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

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.

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.

The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.

The ‘New Testament’, now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood – a material that couldn’t have been widely available in Palestine.

I must have read every issue of ‘Punch’ published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour – that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like ‘Three Men in a Boat.’

I like being a writer.

‘Educational’ refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

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

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

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.

This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.

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.’

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

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

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.

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

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‘adult’ DW.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

‘Discworld’ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

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.

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’?

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

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

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.

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.

Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I’m fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it’s amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

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.

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‘Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?’

Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‘The Lord of the Rings’ is intensely… landscaped. But ‘Discworld’ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

It’s not morbid to talk about death. Most people don’t worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

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

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.

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.

Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‘Wind in the Willows’ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‘The Wind in the Willows.’

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.