Some police forces would believe anything. Not the Metropolitan police, though. The Met was the hardest, most cynically pragmatic, most stubbornly down-to-earth police force in Britain. It would take a lot to faze a copper from the Met. It would take, for example, a huge, battered car that was nothing more nor less than a fireball, a blazing, roaring, twisted metal lemon from Hell, driven by a grinning lunatic in sunglasses, sitting amid the flames, trailing thick black smoke, coming straight at them through the lashing rain and wind at eighty miles an hour.That would do it every time.

One day all of us will die but - and this is the important thing - we are not dead yet.

Nature abhors a lot of things, including vacuums, ships called the Marie Celeste, and the chuck keys for electric drills.

Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu... was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it.

Happiness is not the natural state of mankind, and is never achieved from the outside in.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm a writer who's writing books, and therefore, I don't want to die. You'd miss the end of the book, wouldn't you? You can't die with an unfinished book.