Quotes By Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.
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
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.
Terry Pratchett
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
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.
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
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
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
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
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
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
Terry Pratchett
I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
Terry Pratchett
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.
Terry Pratchett
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.'
Terry Pratchett
'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.
Terry Pratchett
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
Terry Pratchett
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
Terry Pratchett
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.
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
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