Quotes from Terry Pratchett

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.

Mr. Tulip lived his life on that thin line most people occupy just before they haul off and hit someone repeatedly with a wrench.

Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was.

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.'

Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'

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.'

Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.

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

'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.

"It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever" he said. "Have you thought of going into teaching?"

Most of my schooldays were the worst day of my life.

Ye know full well that the meaning of life is to find your gift. To find your gift is happiness. Never tae find it is misery.

If I knew that I could die, I would live. My life, my death, my choice.

Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.

I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.

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 don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

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.

Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.

The days followed one another patiently. Right back at the beginning of the multiverse they had tried all passing at the same time, and it hadn't worked.

Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong.