Top 1451 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Pratchett - Page 24

But the helmet had gold decoration, and the bespoke armorers had made a new gleaming breastplate with useless gold ornamentation on it. Sam Vimes felt like a class traitor every time he wore it. He hated being thought of as one of those people that wore stupid ornamental armor. It was gilt by association.

Colon thought Carrot was simple. Carrot often struck people as simple. And he was. Where people went wrong was thinking that simple meant the same thing as stupid.

The second mouse gets the cheese!

Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.

There have been better attempts at marching, and they have been made by penguins.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Where's the pleasure in bein' the winner if the loser ain't alive to know they've lost?

You have so many sources to draw on when you're a fantasy writer.

When people say "How do you write a book, how does it all happen?" I say, you line things up, and you line them up as actually as you possibly can, but sooner or later the book has got momentum and it's moving along under that momentum. It's like a sculpture, if you're working with the grain of the wood, the wood will start defining what shape it's going to become.

I can't stand any music that requires its singers to be so dumb they wear their baseball caps backwards.

The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real.

YOU MUST LEARN THE COMPASSION PROPER TO YOUR TRADE" "And what's that?" "A SHARP EDGE.

It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline.

Tiffany knew what the problem was immediately. She'd seen it before, at birthday parties. Her brother was suffering from tragic sweet deprivation. Yes, he was surrounded by sweets. But the moment he took any sweet at all, said his sugar-addled brain, that meant he was not taking all the rest. And there were so many sweets he'd never be able to eat them all. It was too much to cope with. The only solution was to burst into tears.

The point of page one is to make people turn to page two and if at the end of the book people think that the book was good value for money, you have achieved something, because if you haven't achieved those things you're not going to achieve the other thing.

But…but you can’t treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can’t say yes please, I’ll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.

The conversation of human beings seldom interested him, but it crossed his mind that the males and females always got along best when neither actually listened fully to what the other one was saying.

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

What is a fantasy map but a space beyond which There Be Dragons?

How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort. IN PAIRS.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

Good and bad is tricky," she said. "I ain't too certain about where people stand. P'raps what matters is which way you face." (pp. 348-349)

But that was just it - hate was exactly the right word. Hate is a force of attraction. Hate is just love with its back turned.

Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't.

It's very rare that I ever go and research a particular subject. Mostly I do serendipitous research, I read stuff, things spinning out of the page.

What I've always said was, hang in there, let me write what I want to write, and you'll probably like it.

The author can always delve into his own personality and find aspects of himself with which he can dress his characters.

A good banana daiquiri is hard to come by. I've only ever found one place in this country that makes a proper one, and that's in Leeds.

I don't read an awful lot of fiction and when I do, it tends to be lightweight stuff.

Everyone is reading what they like and that's a good thing.

I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.

My idea of a good novel was one you made enough money out of to buy a greenhouse.

Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think.

I'd like to sell a lot of books.

Banana daiquiris aren't knock-'em-back-by-the-flagon.

The characters are the plot. What they do and say and the things that happen to them are, in a sense, what the plot is. You can't take character and plot apart from each other, really.

It's never a good idea to ask a man on a tight-rope how he keeps his balance: a) he would probably fall off and b) he probably doesn't know what the muscles are called in any case.

It's actually true that I keep myself going by constantly promising myself that in response for the hard work I will be allowed to do some more hard work later on.

I used to like reading and you read enough books and you overflow and then you start writing.

The oldest fan letter I've had is from someone aged eighty-five.

I'm interested in mythology generally, but India has no special place in my heart - although Hindu gods seem a lot more fun.

TV people in the UK... I'm getting on a lot better with them.

A hardback's harder at Christmas time because that's a good hardback buying time.

First of all you are a writer, a writer is what you are, so it doesn't actually stop the moment you leave your desk, your computer, your keyboard, whatever. Something is operating the back of your mind.

Dark Fantasy is just another way of saying Horror.

I wrote three books, I had three greenhouses. It seemed to me to be very satisfactory.

Generally I start writing when I have even the smallest idea of how a book is going to go, because the physical process of writing itself keeps the mind active and focused on the job at hand. Usually I write in about 5 drafts, but that simply means there are 5 definite times when I go in a linear fashion from the beginning to the end of the book.

Certainly the Americans want to buy rights, but have no idea what to do with them.

After you've been working fairly intensively on a novel for six months you never want to see the damn thing again.

My agent pointed out one day that I had been quoted by a columnist in some American newspaper, and he noted with some glee that they simply identified me by name without reminding people who I was, apparently in the clear expectation that their readers would know who I am.

By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.

The nice thing about your police procedural as opposed to your classic murder mystery is that in a murder mystery you don't know who did it. Whereas in a police procedural you know, you know everything often and you're watching the police home in.

People don't like to say comic so they say Graphic Novel, despite the fact that I don't think the true Graphic Novel has been written anywhere.

Certainly I have no faith in Jehovah, although I think it quite likely that Jesus Christ, as a preacher and a wise man, did indeed exist.

I know loads of coppers and dealt with them a lot when I was a journalist - coppers are easy to write for; they tend to run on rails.

Sometimes you can think that 'I've had enough of wizards!' And sometimes fantasy is not just about wizards.

In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.

It's a guilty secret of a lot of writers, as you get older you don't read as much fiction as you used to, mainly because it's like you are deconstructing it all the time.

There are times when the best writing you can do is to go for a walk or drive, a long drive is ideal.

Who knows what the future holds.