Top 1451 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Pratchett

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English author Terry Pratchett.

Last updated on November 21, 2024.

Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English humourist, satirist, and author of fantasy novels, especially comical works. He is best known for his Discworld series of 41 novels.

English - Author | April 28, 1948 - March 12, 2015

Source: Wikipedia

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

There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

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.

Terry Pratchett

It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.

Terry Pratchett

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

Terry Pratchett

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

Terry Pratchett

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.

Terry Pratchett

I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.

Terry Pratchett

The harder I work, the luckier I become.

Terry Pratchett

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

Terry Pratchett

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

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

In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.

Terry Pratchett

You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.

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 can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.

Terry Pratchett

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

Terry Pratchett

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.'

Terry Pratchett

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.

Terry Pratchett

If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.

Terry Pratchett

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.

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

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

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

In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.

Terry Pratchett

Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.

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

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.

Terry Pratchett

Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.

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

If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

Terry Pratchett

'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.

Terry Pratchett

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

Terry Pratchett

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.'

Terry Pratchett

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.

Terry Pratchett

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

Terry Pratchett

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

Terry Pratchett

Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Terry Pratchett

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

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

It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.

Terry Pratchett

Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

Freedom without limits is just a word.

Terry Pratchett

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.

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

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

Terry Pratchett

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

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

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

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.

Terry Pratchett

If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.

Terry Pratchett

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

Terry Pratchett

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.

Terry Pratchett

Top 1451 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Pratchett

Related Authors