Terry Pratchett

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

“It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.”

“DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”

“Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life.”

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

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

“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.”

“Wisdom comes from experience. Experience is often a result of lack of wisdom.”

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”

“Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.”

“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 [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stak...”

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.”

“This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.”

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

“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 violen...”

“Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them”

“It's not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren't doing it.”

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

“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.”

“If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.”

“Most books on witchcraft will tell you that witches work naked. This is because most books on witchcraft are written by men.”

“I ain’t against gods and goddesses, in their place. But they’ve got to be the ones we make ourselves. Then we can take ’em to bits for the parts when we don’t need ’em anymore, see?”

“The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.”

“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:...”

“Progress just means bad things happen faster.”

“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.”

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”

“Do you think it's possible for an entire nation to be insane?”

“Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there. Yᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇɴ'ᴛ ʜᴇᴀʀᴅ ᴏғ ᴛʜᴇ Bᴀʏ Oғ Mᴀɴᴛᴇ, ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜ? he said. “No, sir,” said Mort. Fᴀᴍᴏᴜs sʜɪᴘᴡʀᴇᴄᴋ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ. “Was there?” Tʜᴇʀᴇ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ, said Death, ɪғ I ᴄᴀɴ ғɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅᴀᴍɴ ᴘʟᴀᴄᴇ.”

“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'?”

“Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.”

“This was not the time to say “I don’t know.” The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn’t be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried...and then his mind caught a...”

“It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.”

“Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. 'The Lord of the Rings' is intensely... landscaped. But 'Discworld' is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.”

“I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.”

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”

“Granny was an old-fashioned witch. She didn’t do good for people, she did right by them.”

“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.”

“How can you protect yourself by carrying a sword if you don’t know how to use it?’ Not me, sir. Other people. They see the sword and don’t attack me,’ said Maladict patiently. Yes, but if they did, lad, you wouldn’t be any good with it,’ said the sergeant. No, sir. I’d probably settle for just rippi...”

“Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.”

“And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city, it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate.”

“Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.”

“Speak softly and employ a huge man with a crowbar.”

“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.”

“On the Disc, the Gods aren't so much worshipped, as they are blamed.”

“They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.”

“That’s what being alive is, Thing! It’s being badly prepared for everything! Because you only get one chance, 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...”

“Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.”

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

“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.”

“Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.”

“I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.”

“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 just rearrange words into a pleasing order for money.”

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

“I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.”

“You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.”

“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.”

“Von außen – und erst recht von innen – sieht der Prozess wissenschaftlicher Forschung ungeordnet und verwirrend aus. Man ist versucht zu glauben, Wissenschaftler seien selber unordentlich und verwirrt. In gewisser Hinsicht sind sie es – das gehört zur Forschung. Wenn man wüsste, was man tut, wäre es...”

“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 p...”

“Какъв е смисъла на образованието - помисли си, - щом хората ще го ползват?”

“Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.”

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

“Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.”

“Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.”

“I AM IMPRESSED. “I have faith.” REALLY? IN WHAT PARTICULAR DEITY? “Oh, none of them.”

“I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it’s so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.”

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

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

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”

“The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.”