Terry Pratchett Quotes

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

Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.

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.’

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.

Siren voices tell me, ‘You don’t have to keep going on.’ And then you think, ‘I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?’ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

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

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

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

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

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.

Death: Human beings make life so interesting. Do you know, that in a universe so full of wonders, they have managed to invent boredom.

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

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

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

I have to write because if I don’t get something down then after a while I feel it’s going to bang the side of my head off.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.