It seems sensible to me that we should look to the medical profession, that over the centuries has helped us to live longer and healthier lives, to help us die peacefully among our loved ones in our own home without a long stay in God's waiting room.

The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained perfectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace paper in mundane ink. It would be a mistake to think that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangeous trick of making fireworks go off in the privacy of the reader's brain.

Stand before your god, bow before your king, kneel before your man.

Welcome to fear, said Moist to himself. It's hope, turned inside out. You know it can't go wrong, you're sure it can't go wrong... But it might.

Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants - the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare becoming a mere lower-class brawl.

The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.

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.