Quotes from Terry Pratchett

I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.

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.'

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.

'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.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

Granny Weatherwas was not a jouster in the lists of love, but, as an intelligent onlooker, she knew how the game was played.

Mort was already aware that love made you feel hot and cold and cruel and weak, but he hadn't realized that it could make you stupid.

Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

Death: THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT. Albert: Oh, yes, sir. But alcohol sort of compensates for not getting them.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.

HUMAN BEINGS MAKE LIFE SO INTERESTING. DO YOU KNOW, THAT IN A UNIVERSE SO FULL OF WONDERS, THEY HAVE MANAGED TO INVENT BOREDOM. (Death)

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards!

It's still magic even if you know how it's done.

He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.

There are times in life when people must know when not to let go. Balloons are designed to teach small children this.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.