Terry Pratchett Quotes

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.

Assassins did have a certain code, after all. It was dishonorable to kill someone if you weren’t being paid.

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.

If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.

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.

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.

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

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.’

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

You’re not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more,” said Yo-less. “It’s speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.

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.

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

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

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.

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.

The harder I work, the luckier I become.