In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
Terry Pratchett
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
Terry Pratchett
This isn’t life in the fast lane, it’s life in the oncoming traffic.
Terry Pratchett
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Terry Pratchett
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don’t find out til too late that he’s been playing with two queens all along.
Terry Pratchett
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
Terry Pratchett
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.
Terry Pratchett
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
Terry Pratchett
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
Terry Pratchett
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
Terry Pratchett
Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
Terry Pratchett
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
It’s not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren’t doing.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.’
Terry Pratchett
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven’t heard of anyone who’s got better from Alzheimer’s.
Terry Pratchett
Freedom without limits is just a word.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
I read the ‘Old Testament’ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‘The Origin Of Species’, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.
Terry Pratchett
I don’t think about the end game. I’ve got lots to occupy my mind. It’s the rage that keeps me going.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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?
Terry Pratchett
I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
Terry Pratchett
You can’t trample infidels when you’re a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: ‘Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?’
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting ‘All the Gods are bastards.’
Terry Pratchett
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Terry Pratchett
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
Terry Pratchett
There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
Terry Pratchett
Sooner or later we’re all someone’s dog.
Terry Pratchett
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
Terry Pratchett
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that’s it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called ‘The Truth’.
Terry Pratchett
If it wasn’t for the fun and money, I really don’t know why I’d bother.
Terry Pratchett