I would rather stare at the wall for half an hour than watch an episode of any of the 53,801 Australian soap operas now cluttering up UK TV.

The diplomatic thing for me to say is that if publishers are dressing up other authors as Terry Pratchett clones then they are doing a disservice to those authors. If they didn't dress them as clones but did something different, then those authors could be pioneering in a different sense.

You did something because it had always been done, and the explanation was, ‘But we’ve always done it this way.’ A million dead people can’t have been wrong, can they?

There are all kinds of darkness, and all kinds of things can be found in them, imprisoned, banished, lost or hidden. Sometimes they escape. Sometimes they simply fall out. Sometimes they just can't take it any more.

We live in a science fiction universe. We have done for a long time.

I know loads of coppers and dealt with them a lot when I was a journalist - coppers are easy to write for; they tend to run on rails.

You say that you people don’t burn folk and sacrifice people anymore, but that’s what true faith would mean, y’see? Sacrificin’ your own life, one day at a time, to the flame, declarin’ the truth of it, workin’ for it, breathin’ the soul of it. That’s religion. Anything else is just . . . is just bein’ nice. And a way of keepin’ in touch with the neighbors.