A police procedural novel can be even funnier if the police include Trolls and Dwarves and things like that. You start looking at the whole basis of the cop novel. You get the cop moving in a different way when you've actually set it in a fantasy city.

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

A hardback's harder at Christmas time because that's a good hardback buying time.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

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 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.

Now that their long war was over, they could get on with the proper concern of all civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.