Top 1451 Quotes & Sayings by Terry Pratchett - Page 3

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.

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

I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.

You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.

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.

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. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.

I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.

I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.

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

Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.

Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.

The universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. There is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

Ultimately, there is the freedom to take the consequences.

...and the funny thing was that people who weren't entirely certain they were right always argued much louder than other people, as if the main person they were trying to convince were themselves.

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

A bad hunter chases. A good hunter waits.

...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works.

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away.

A good plan isn't one where someone wins, it's where nobody thinks they've lost.

If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.

You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more," said Yo-less. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

Assassins did have a certain code, after all. It was dishonorable to kill someone if you weren't being paid.

Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.

Goodness is about what you do. Not who you pray to.

Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

The conflict is not between Christianity and Islam or between East and West - instead, it is between stupid people and other stupid people.

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

If you have enough book space, I don't want to talk to you.

Stupid men are often capable of things the clever would not dare to contemplate.

Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying 'End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,' the paint wouldn't even have time to dry.

Not all questions are answered, but fortunately some answers are questioned.

Always remember that the crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show.

You get a wonderful view from the point of no return.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

Time is a drug. Too much of it kills you.

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive.

The worst thing you can do is nothing.

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

There have been times, lately, when I dearly wished that I could change the past. Well, I can’t, but I can change the present, so that when it becomes the past it will turn out to be a past worth having.