Terry Pratchett Quotes

Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.

Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

I'm not cruel, sir, I won't shoot you in the guts, but I will make you realize how much you took your toes for granted.

Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.

You can't kill me, I've got a magic... AAAARGH !

Magic is just a way of saying 'I don't know.'

Credulous: having views about the world, the universe and humanity's place in it that are shared only by very unsophisticated people and the most intelligent and advanced mathematicians and physicists.

He'd heard that writers spent all day in their dressing gowns drinking champagne. This is, of course, absolutely true.

Young adults that actually read are reading bodice rippers and best-sellers and me. And Horror.

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.

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.

If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.

Unseen University was much bigger on the inside. Thousands of years as the leading establishment of practical magic in a world where dimensions were largely a matter of chance in any case had left it bulging in places where it shouldn't have places. There were rooms containing rooms which, if you entered them, turned out to contain the room you'd started with, which can be a problem if you are in a conga line.

Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that'd happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn't a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time.

Rings try to find their way back to their owner. Someone ought to write a book about it.

Thats how we survive infinity - we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

My name is immaterial,' she said. That's a pretty name,' said Rincewind.

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

I may be daft but I'm no' stupid!

Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.

YOU FEAR TO DIE? "It's not that I don't want... I mean, I've always...it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break.

Jeremy tried to be an interesting person. The trouble was that he was the kind of person who, having decided to be an interesting person, would first of all try to find a book called How to Be An Interesting Person and then see whether there were any courses available.

That was the very centre of his genius - he invented things that anyone could have thought of, and men who can invent things that anyone could have thought of are very rare men.

I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.

I know it's a very human thing to say 'Is there anything I can do', but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

If you had enough money, you could hardly commit crimes at all. You just perpetrated amusing little peccadilloes.

Never f*!k with the ineffable.

The trouble with life was that you didn’t get a chance to practice before doing it for real.

His sister had been sent down to the village to ask Mistress Garlick the witch how you stopped spelling recommendation.

Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.

History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.

If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.

Smaller-than-Medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock

It must be powerful language if you canna make oout what the heel it’s goin’ on aboot!

I wonder if it's like this for mountain climbers, he thought. You climb bigger and bigger mountains and you know that one day one of them is going to be just that bit too steep. But you go on doing it, because it’s so-o good when you breathe the air up there. And you know you'll die falling.

Money doesn't buy happiness, Gytha." "I only wanted to rent it for a few weeks!

Blessings be on this house," Granny said, perfunctorily. It was always a good opening remark for a witch. It concentrated people's minds on what other things might be on this house.

A world like that, which exists only because the gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive. And sex too, of course.

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.

Fantasy is escapism, but wait... Why is this wrong? What are you escaping from, and where are you escaping to? Is the story opening windows or slamming doors? The British author G.K. Chesterton summarized the role of fantasy very well. He said its purpose was to take the everyday, commonplace world and lift it up and turn it around and show it to us from a different perspective, so that once again we see it for the first time and realize how marvelous it is. Fantasy - the ability to envisage the world in many different ways - is one of the skills that make us human.

Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

It's not Brits who think American readers are a bunch of whinging morons with the geo-social understanding of a wire coathanger, it's American editors.

Mere animals couldn’t possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

Particles of raw inspiration sleet through the universe all the time. Every once in a while one of them hits a receptive mind, which then invents DNA or the flute sonata form or a way of making light bulbs wear out in half the time. But most of them miss. Most people go through their lives without being hit by even one.

They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings. It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on