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

If my father could have sat up in bed and said goodbye, I'd have pressed the button. I wouldn't have been able to see for crying, but I would have considered that a duty.

Humans can think inhuman thoughts.

I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.

I don't hold with paddlin' with the occult," said Granny firmly. "Once you start paddlin' with the occult you start believing in spirits, and when you start believing in spirits you start believing in demons, and then before you know where you are you're believing in gods. And then you're in trouble." "But all them things exist," said Nanny Ogg. "That's no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages 'em.

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.

My idea of a good novel was one you made enough money out of to buy a greenhouse.