Terry Pratchett famous quotes

There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork. And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.
-- Terry Pratchett

#People #Ankh #Way

It doesn't matter if dragons are flying overhead or whatever - a lot of Victoriana is still cut in the frame of fantasy.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Cutting #Dragons #Flying

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

#Inspirational #Life #Spiritual

I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Night #Thinking #Events

Its useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Perspective #World #This World

The book is not completely written until someone else has read it.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Change #Travel #Life Changing

I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Thinking #Style

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

#Funny #Life #Men

I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Zero #Progress #Stories

THERE'S NO JUSTICE, said Mort. JUST US.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Justice #Said

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Hate #Book #Writing

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

#Dream #Needs #Wages

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

#Months #Six #Want

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

#Thinking #Keys #Enough

You're allowed to grant people into the darkness, but you must allow them to come out again.
-- Terry Pratchett

#People #Darkness #Grants

HOROSCOPE: Today is a good time for making new friends. A good deed may have unforeseen consequences. Don’t upset any druids. You will soon be going on a very strange journey. Your lucky food is small cucumbers. People pointing knives at you are probably up to no good. PS, we really mean it about the druids.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Mean #Journey #Knives

I read the best works of some of the best satirists, and indeed best writers from the beginning of the Victorian era to about the 1960s. If you want to be a blacksmith, you go and watch the blacksmith working, and you work out what the blacksmith does.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Work Out #Watches #Want

Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Dog #Trying #Dexterity

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Attitude #Stupid #Mean

Coffee is a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your older self.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Coffee #Self #Rights

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Reading #Years

No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Philosophy #Thinking #Mind

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

#Country #Race #Different

The truth isn't easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap and much more difficult to find.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Pages #Soap #Truth Is

Progress just means bad things happen faster.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Mean #Progress #Faster

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

#Fantasy #Source #Draws

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Ideas #Dragons #Enemy

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Thinking #Two

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Life #Powerful #Stories

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Stuff #Spinning #Research

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Dream #Stars #Work

The best research is the research that you don't know that you are doing.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Research

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Depressing #Thinking #Faults

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Moving #Book #Writing

What was supposed to be so special about a full moon? It was only a big circle of light. And the dark of the moon was only darkness. But halfway between the two, when the moon was between the worlds of light and dark, when even the moon lived on the edge...maybe then a witch could believe in the moon.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Believe #Dark #Moon

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Mind #Keyboards #Firsts

The secret is not to dream," she whispered. "The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me any more. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Dream #Real #Secret

Some of my best sources are ex-policemen, just to get a feeling of what it's like to be one. And it's quite different from being a civilian - except, of course, that I believe that policemen are just special sorts of civilians. Things like how hard it is to hold someone that doesn't want to be held. This is the kind of thing that is worth knowing.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Believe #Knowing #Feelings

The Monks of Cool, whose tiny and exclusive monastery is hidden in a really cool and laid-back valley in the lower Ramtops, have a passing-out test for a novice. He is taken into a room full of all types of clothing and asked: Yo, my son, which of these is the most stylish thing to wear? And the correct answer is: Hey, whatever I select.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Taken #Son #Laid Back

The best research you can do is to talk to people.
-- Terry Pratchett

#People #Research

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours - he was incredibly good at it.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Mean #Hands

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

#Writing #Long #Walks

So much universe, and so little time.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Littles #Universe

Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Mind #Age

Nanny's philosophy of life was to do what seemed like a good idea at the time, and do it as hard as possible. It had never let her down.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Philosophy #Philosophical #Ideas

It was Sci-Fi and fantasy that got me reading, and Sci-Fi writers in particular have pack rat minds. They introduce all sorts of interesting themes and ideas into their books, and so for me it was a short leap to go from the fantasy and Sci-Fi genres to folklore, mythology, ancient history and philosophy. I did not read philosophy because I set out to become a philosopher; I read it because it looked interesting.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Philosophy #Book #Reading

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Opportunity #People #Temptation

I have no fear of death whatsoever. I suspect that few people do, what they all fear is what might happen in the years or months before death.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Years #People #Might

God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players, ie., everybody, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Moving #Dark #Player

Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Dignity #Habit #Gravity

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Fashion #Jobs #Book

William: "I'm sure we can all pull together, sir." Vetinari: "Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Men #Together #Cooperation

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Character #Plot

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful: something to be admired from a distance, not up close.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Beautiful #Distance #Fire

We are monkeys. We like to chatter. Chattering doesn't cost us anything.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Cost #Monkeys

You are in favour of the common people?” said Dragon mildly. The common people?” said Vimes. “They’re nothing special. They’re no different from the rich and powerful except they’ve got no money or power. But the law should be there to balance things up a bit. So I suppose I’ve got to be on their side.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Powerful #Dragons #Law

Ingenuity and incongruity always cheer me up.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Cheer #Cheer Me Up #Ingenuity

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Block #Writing #California

The phrase "may you live in interesting times" is the lowest in a trilogy of Chinese curses that continue "may you come to the attention of those in authority" and finish with "may the gods give you everything you ask for." I have no idea about its authenticity.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Ideas #Giving #Interesting

...inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Birthday #Death #Suicide

All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be "do as you would be done by." It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Evil #People

The thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Soccer #Sports #Football

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Wise #Jesus #Men

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Sadness #Battle #Flags

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Hard Work #Response

They didn't know why these things were funny. Sometimes you laugh because you've got no more room for crying. Sometimes you laugh because table manners on a beach are funny. And sometimes you laugh because you're alive, when you really shouldn't be.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Beach #Laughing #Alive

There's that lovely thing for the first month or two of writing a new book: OK, I don't know what that character's going to do, but we'll find out later. After about three or four months you come to that bit where you've got to put some plot in before it's too late, and you have to go back and start inserting plot, and, ooh, I've left out the literature, OK, lets put some in.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Character #Writing

Everywhere's been where it is ever since it was first put there. It's called geography.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Firsts #Geography

I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month.
-- Terry Pratchett

#School #Order #Way

Your average witch is not, by nature, a social animal as far as other witches are concerned. There's a conflict of dominant personalities. There's a group of ringleaders without a ring. There's the basic unwritten rule of witchcraft, which is 'Don't do what you will, do what I say.' The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can't avoid it.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Animal #Average #Personality

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Long #Pirate #Dying

No it's not!" said Constable Visit. "Atheism is a denial of a god." "Therefore It Is A Religious Position," said Dorfl. "Indeed, A True Atheist Thinks Of The Gods Constantly, Albeit In Terms of Denial. Therefore, Atheism Is A Form Of Belief. If The Atheist Truly Did Not Believe, He Or She Would Not Bother To Deny.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Religious #Atheist #Believe

Well, basically there are two sorts of opera," said Nanny, who also had the true witch's ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever. "There's your heavy opera, where basically people sing foreign and it goes like "Oh oh oh, I am dyin', oh I am dyin', oh oh oh, that's what I'm doin'", and there's your light opera, where they sing in foreign and it basically goes "Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!", although sometimes they drink champagne instead. That's basically all of opera, reely.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Beer #Light #Two

When in doubt, choose to live.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Doubt

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Names

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Way

I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they put their minds to it, you just have to give them an interest.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Men #Medicine #Dwarves

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.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Space #Together

Every intelligent being, whether it breathes or not, coughs nervously at some time in its life.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Intelligent #Breathe

Cats will amusingly tolerate humans only until someone comes up with a tin opener that can be operated with a paw.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Cat #Paws #Tin

There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass! Who's been pinching my beer?
-- Terry Pratchett

#Truth #Beer #Thinking

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

#Science #Technology #Magic

I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire," said Miss Tick. "There may be no survivors.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Fire #Missing #House

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Thinking #People #Stories

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Writing #Interesting

It is important that we know where we come from, because if you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Important #Where You Come #Where We Come

The elevator shaft was a kind of heat sink. Hot food was cold by the time it arrived. Cold food got colder. No one knew what would happen to ice cream, but it would probably involve some rewriting of the laws of thermodynamics.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Ice Cream #Law #Hot

People flock in, nevertheless, in search of answers to those questions only librarians are considered to be able to answer, such as "Is this the laundry?" "How do you spell surreptitious?" and, on a regular basis, "Do you have a book I remember reading once? It had a red cover and it turned out they were twins.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Book #Reading #People

She heard him mutter, 'Can you take away this grief?' 'I'm sorry,' she replied. 'Everyone asks me. And I would not do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Sorry #Grief #Bereavement

Vimes had got around to a Clean Desk policy. It was a Clean Floor strategy that eluded him at the moment.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Moments #Strategy #Desks

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Imagination #Made #Humans

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.
-- Terry Pratchett

#People #Evil #Treats

At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Powerful #Littles #Facts

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

#Causes #World #Ripple

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

#Men #Average #Branches

Incidentally, it's best not to argue with the nursing staff. I find the best course of action is to throw some chocolates in one direction and hurry off in the other while their attention is distracted.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Nursing #One Direction #Chocolate

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

#People #Crowds #Remember

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Men #People #Sin

Adventure! People talked about the idea as if it were something worthwhile, rather than a mess of bad food, no sleep and strange people inexplicably trying to stick pointed objects in bits of you.
-- Terry Pratchett

#Travel #Adventure #Sleep