Zitat des Tages von Terry Pratchett:
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
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.
Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.
I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
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.
You can't die with an unfinished book.
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.
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
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.
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 like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.
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.
Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'
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.'
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
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.
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.'
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
Freedom without limits is just a word.
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.
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.
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.'
'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.
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
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.