Terry Pratchett

When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.

Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

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

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

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

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.

You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.

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

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

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.

Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.

I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.

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

'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 Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.

I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.

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

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

Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.

I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.

The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. 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.

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.

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.

I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

I think it does Discworld good if I don't write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.

I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.

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.

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.

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.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

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.

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.

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.

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

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.

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.

I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

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

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.

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.

'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.

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

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

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.