Quotes By Terry Pratchett

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

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 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 intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?

The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.

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'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.

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.

Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.

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.

It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.

You can't die with an unfinished book.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

'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.

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.