Quotes By Terry Pratchett

Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

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.

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

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting "All the Gods are bastards."

Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.

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

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.

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

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.

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.

I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.

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.'

The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.

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.

'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.

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

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. 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.

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'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.

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.'

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.

It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

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.

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.'

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.

There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.

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?

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