Terry Pratchett Quotes

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

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.

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

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

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

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

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

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.

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

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 try to make computers say things like You have 60 seconds to achieve safe distance.

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.

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.

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.