writer, novelist, journalist, screenwriter, science fiction writer, children's writer, author
🔗 Read on Wikipedia1948 – 2015
I was thinking of 'duh?' in the sense of 'a sentence containing several words more than three letters long, and possibly requiring general knowledge or a sense of history that extends past last Tuesday, has been used in my presence.'
Bognor has always meant to me the quintessential English seaside experience (before all this global warming stuff): driving in the rain to get there, walking around in the rain looking for something to do when you're there, and driving home in the rain again...
I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him.
I'm referred to, I see, as 'the biggest banker in modern publishing'. Now there's a line that needed the celebrated Guardian proof-reading.
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
I save about twenty drafts — that's ten meg of disc space — and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.
We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.
I always thought Detritus would be good at: "I bet you're wondrin' how many time I fired dis crossbow--"
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
Currently there's five machines permanently networked here. They all contain the serious core stuff. A couple of the machines are pensioned off 486s, with little other value now. Plus there's two Jaz drives in the building and the portable also carries a fair amount of stuff. Plus every Friday a man comes around and carves all the new stuff onto stone slabs and buries them in the garden... I think I'm okay.
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
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.
If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'd have written 18 books about Rincewind.
Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb -- they're often students, for heaven's sake.
Death isn't online. If he was, there would be a sudden drop in the death rate. Although it'd be interesting to see if he'd post things like: DON'T YOU THINK I SOUND LIKE JAMES EARL JONES?
The net software here did its meltdown trick again at the weekend (it happens about once every six months -- if only everything was as reliable as WordPerfect 4.2, which only chews up a novel about once every two or three years...)
If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.
I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.
I'd like to stand up for the rights of people who put everything on their burger -- chutney, mustard, pickle, mustard pickle, tomato sauce... It is common knowledge in my family that I can't tell the difference between a veggie burger and a meat one, because the ratio of burger to pickles is so high. [either misquoted or mis-thought, since not to be able to tell would mean the burger:pickles ratio is so low]
Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there're no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum...
Too many people want to have written.
DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.
Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possibly go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.
Freedom without limits is just a word.
Up until now I'd always thought RSI meant 'I hate my damn job'.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
This book had two authors, and they were both the same person.
Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.
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.
YOU'RE ONLY PUTTING OFF THE INEVITABLE, he said.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
On the fifth day the Governor of the town called all the tribal chieftains to an audience in the market square, to hear their grievances. He didn't always do anything about them, but at least they got heard, and he nodded a lot, and everyone felt better about it at least until they got home. This is politics.
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Keep 'em busy. That was one of the three rules of being chief that old Grimm had passed on to him. Act confidently, never say 'I don't know,' and when all else fails, keep 'em busy.
It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
I wish that the people who sing about the deeds of heroes would think about the people who have to clear up after them.
Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.
Anyway, just because you're sworn enemies doesn't mean you can't be friends, does it?
Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough.
Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
When they're standing right in front of you, kings are a kind of speech impediment.
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
'I can't have your subjects throwing my family over the balcony, that would never do.''I'll do it myself.'
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
'Whose side are they on?' said Brocando.'Sides? Their own, I suppose, just like everyone else.'
My experience in Amsterdam is that cyclists ride where the hell they like and aim in a state of rage at all pedestrians while ringing their bell loudly, the concept of avoiding people being foreign to them.
'Stop that!' he shouted. 'You're soldiers! You're not supposed to fight!'
This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants — the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare from becoming a mere lower-class brawl.
I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.
The Deftmenes are mad and the Dumii are sane, thought Snibril, and that's just the same as being mad except that it's quieter. If only you could mix them together, you'd end up with normal people.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.
Normally its narrow streets were crowded with stalls, and people from all over the Carpet. They'd all be trying to cheat one another in that open-and-above-board way known as 'doing business'.
I've got wide tastes, but I don't like jazz.
The sign outside the shop said Apothecary, which meant that the shop was owned by a sort of early chemist, who would give you herbs and things until you got better or at least stopped getting any worse.
I intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, 'If wet, in the library.' Who could say that this is bad?
'Well … welcome. My house is your house', his brow suddenly furrowed and he looked worried, 'although only in a metaphorical sense, you understand, because I would not, much as I always admired your straightforward approach, and indeed your forthright stance, actually give you my house, it being the only house I have, and therefore the term is being extended in an, as it were, gratuitous fashion —'
Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?'
'What would Deftmenes be if we went around obeying orders all the time?''Ha!' said Brocando, 'but the trouble about obeying orders is, it becomes a habit. And then everything depends on who's giving the orders.'
I regarded finding I had a form of Alzheimer's as an insult and decided to do my best to marshal any kind of forces I could against this wretched disease. I have posterior cortical atrophy or PCA. They say, rather ingenuously, that if you have Alzheimer's it's the best form of Alzheimer's to have.
'Waiting is the worst part,' said Pismire.'No it isn't,' said Owlglass, who wasn't even being trusted to hold a sword. 'I expect that having long sharp swords stuck in you is the worst part.'
I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.
'But we should kill him!''Because it doesn't matter what he is. It matters what we are.'
It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
Boot-faced cats aren't born but made, often because they've tried to outstare or occasionally rape a speeding car and have been repaired by a vet who just pulled all the bits together and stuck the stitches in where there was room.
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
Cats don't hunt seals. They would if they knew what they were and where to find them. But they don't, so that's all right.
Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.
It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17 % of Real cats end their lives with the same name they started with. Much family effort goes into selecting one at the start ("She looks like a Winnifred to me"), and the as the years roll by it suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or Ratbag.
That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said - one of the famous lady novelists - 'unhappy is the family that contains an author'?
Next comes the realist phase ("After all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.").
I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.
Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.
Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.
Consider the situation. There you are, forehead like a set of balconies, worrying about the long-term effects of all this new 'fire' stuff on the environment, you're being chased and eaten by most of the planet's large animals, and suddenly tiny versions of one of the worst of them wanders into the cave and starts to purr.
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
Perhaps, if you knew you were going to die, your senses crammed in as much detail as they could while they still had the chance...
Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. 'The Lord of the Rings' is intensely... landscaped. But 'Discworld' is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.
'You're not going to die, are you sir?' he said.'Of course I am. Everyone is. That's what being alive is all about.'
No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away...
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In 'The Colour of Magic' most of the city is set alight. It's a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams's 'The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.'
The way to deal with an impossible task was to chop it down into a number of merely very difficult tasks, and break each one of them into a group of horribly hard tasks, and each of them into tricky jobs, and each of them...
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.
You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
Everything makes sense a bit at a time. But when you try to think of it all at once, it comes out wrong.
It was said that life was cheap in Ankh-Morpork. This was of course, completely wrong. Life was often very expensive; you could get death for free.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and thoroughly worth living.
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
I asked a teacher what the opposite of a miracle was and she, without thinking, I assume, said it was an act of God. You shouldn't say something like that to the kind of kid who will grow up to be a writer; we have long memories.
The pen is mightier than the sword if the sword is very short, and the pen is very sharp.
As a boy I had a clear image of the Almighty: He had a tail coat and pinstriped trousers, black, slicked-down hair and an aquiline nose. On the whole, I was probably a rather strange child, and I wonder what my life might have been like if I'd met a decent theologian when I was nine.
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
I don't believe. I never have, not in big beards in the sky.
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'
Tolkien's dead. J. K. Rowling said no. Philip Pullman couldn't make it. Hi, I'm Terry Pratchett.
The bravest person I've ever met was a young boy going through massive amounts of treatment for a very rare, complex and unpleasant disease. I last saw him at a Discworld convention, where he chose to take part in a game as an assassin. He died not long afterwards, and I wish I had his fortitude and sense of style.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
It's not worth doing something unless you were doing something that someone, somewere, would much rather you weren't doing.
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.
A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.
Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that's a miracle. But of course if someone is
Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.
Truth! Freedom! Justice! And a hard-boiled egg!
The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.
Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.
Sometimes it is better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about 'Wind in the Willows' and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought - you know about 'The Wind in the Willows.'
Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn't take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.
You can't build a plot out of jokes. You need tragic relief. And you need to let people know that when a lot of frightened people are running around with edged weaponry, there are deaths. Stupid deaths, usually. I'm not writing 'The A-Team' - if there's a fight going on, people will get hurt. Not letting this happen would be a betrayal.
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
You can't remember the plot of the Dr Who movie because it didn't have one, just a lot of plot holes strung together. It did have a lot of flashing lights, though.
You can't die with an unfinished book.
I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.
I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
I particularly admire are Mark Twain and Jerome K. Jerome who wrote in a certain tone of voice which was humane and understanding of humanity, but always ready to annotate its little foibles. I think I'd lay my cards down on that, and say that it's that that I'm trying to do.
It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.
My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
How do you get all those coins?" asked Mort.
Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.
In my heart, I'm just a kid from the council houses. I can remember the old cottage and my dad coming round with the tin bath. I'm not a rich man.
I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that's going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It's when you go backwards through the 'begats' and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, 'Hang on, that's a big punishment for eating one lousy apple... There's a human-rights issue.'
I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.
I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.
I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it. You tell the truth. I even wrote a book called 'The Truth'.
I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.
Plot exposition that can be gently wound out by the authorial voice and internal monologue of a character in the length of a page has to be delivered in a matter of seconds on the stage.
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.
If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
The ideal death, I think, is what was the ideal Victorian death, you know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.
It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It's called living.
The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it's just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.
I like being a writer.
By the time you've reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance.
Truthfully, without over-egging it, as I often do, the library and journalism, those things made me who I am.
My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.
The truth may be out there, but the lies are inside your head.
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?
I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
'Nation' was one that I'd have killed myself if I hadn't written it. It was absolutely important to me that I wrote it. It was good for my soul.
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
There is always time for another last minute
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.
I've always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyone has an imagination. What I have is a relentlessly controlled imagination. What looks like wild invention is actually quite carefully calculated.
If words had weight, a single sentence from Death would have anchored a ship.
For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.
In all seriousness, people think that it's the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words - that's how long a novel is.
If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.
I don't really plan. I'm almost intuitive about things.
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
Fantasy is uni-age. You can start it in the creche, and it follows you to death.
I believe everyone should have a good death. You know, with your grandchildren around you, a bit of sobbing. Because after all, tears are appropriate on a death bed. And you say goodbye to your loved ones, making certain that one of them has been left behind to look after the shop.
I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
Neither of my parents went to church, but they did everything that you needed to do to be Christian. That's something a Quaker would call an intimation of the divine.
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
The calendar of the Theocracy of Muntab counts down, not up. No-one knows why, but it might not be a good idea to hang around and find out.
It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer's you are an old fart. That's how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone.
I think I work much harder on the children's books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I've never been quite certain why this is.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
The harder I work, the luckier I become.
Often I sort of work up and down the manuscript. I sometimes used to go ahead of myself to see what was going to happen next, to make certain it fits what was going to be happening soon.
Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.
I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION. AND EVEN OBLIVION MUST END SOMEDAY. LORD, WILL YOU GRANT ME JUST A LITTLE TIME? FOR THE PROPER BALANCE OF THINGS. TO RETURN WHAT WAS GIVEN. FOR THE SAKE OF PRISONERS AND THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.
Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.
I read the 'Old Testament' all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read 'The Origin Of Species', hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it's called Life.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational - and I'm speaking the written science fiction, not 'Star Trek.' Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they're clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
I am certain no one sets out to be cruel, but our treatment of the elderly ill seems to have no philosophy to it. As a society, we should establish whether we have a policy of life at any cost.
There are things around, and I know where they can be got quite easily, but I quite like waking up to the sunshine.
The thing is, 'Discworld' had been going on for a very long time, and I've written children's books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I'd do is I'd franchise it to myself.
I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people's memories for a while.
I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.
The most watched programme on the BBC, after the news, is probably 'Doctor Who.' What has happened is that science fiction has been subsumed into modern literature. There are grandparents out there who speak Klingon, who are quite capable of holding down a job. No one would think twice now about a parallel universe.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
The reaper does not listen to the harvest.
I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
That's a nice song," said young Sam, and Vimes remembered that he was hearing it for the first time.
Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.
I can no longer type, so I use TalkingPoint and Dragon Dictate. It's a speech-to-text program, and there's an add-on for talking which some guys came up with.
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon.
Knowing that you are going to die is, I suspect, the beginning of wisdom.
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.
I must have read every issue of 'Punch' published in the 20th century, and I think in the process I picked up the true voice of English humour - that amiable, fairly liberal, laconic voice which you find in something like 'Three Men in a Boat.'
Previous generations understood about death, and undoubtedly would have seen a reasonable amount of death. Once you get into the Victorian era, you might well have seen the funerals of many of your siblings before you were very old.
Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself.
Sooner or later it'd get to you. Death was fascinated by humans, and study was never a one-way thing. A man might spend his life peering at the private life of elementary particles and then find he either knew who he was or where he was, but not both.
WHO KNOWS WHAT EVIL LURKS IN THE HEART OF MEN?
An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.
When you read, I'm sure you don't realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don't do that.
There was once a caustic comment from someone suggesting I was breeding a new race. Fans from different countries have married, amazing things like that. I've been to some of the weddings. I went to one here the other day, a pagan ceremony.
I meant," said Ipslore bitterly, "what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?"
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.
When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.
WHAT FOR IS THIS BOX PADDED? IS IT TO BE SAT ON? CAN IT BE THAT IT IS CAT-FLAVOURED?
Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.
THERE IS NO JUSTICE" said Death "JUST ME
IT'S A SWORD, said the Hogfather. THEY'RE NOT /MEANT/ TO BE SAFE.
I REMEMBER WHEN ALL THIS WILL BE AGAIN.
He said that there was death and taxes, and taxes was worse, because at least death didn’t happen to you every year.
DEAFNESS DOESN'T PREVENT COMPOSERS HEARING THE MUSIC. IT PREVENTS THEM HEARING THE DISTRACTIONS.
The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned no later than the last date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.
At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.
He took his hands off the oars and pulled in the mooring rope. If I make a couple of loops, he thought, I can strap the axe on to my back.
YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF CAKE
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
You can't give her that!' she screamed. 'It's not safe!'
Death: "THERE ARE BETTER THINGS IN THE WORLD THAN ALCOHOL, ALBERT."
We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
Life could be horrible in the wrong trouser of time.
There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn't live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.
He'd been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.
When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth.
If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.
It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases - one was Alzheimer's, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer's.
I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.
Progress just means bad things happen faster.
'Educational' refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
I think it does Discworld good if I don't write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.
'Discworld' is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.
I think I would like to go into modelling. Of course, I don't know how to do it, and wouldn't be any good at it if I did, so I'm going to employ someone to walk the catwalks on my behalf. It would still be me, of course.
I know three people who have got better after a brain tumour. I haven't heard of anyone who's got better from Alzheimer's.
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.
No one's policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.
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.
There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.
I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.
Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.
What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you're hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.
Genius is always allowed some leeway, once the hammer has been pried from its hands and the blood has been cleaned up.
I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can't so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?
Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
I have to write because if I don't get something down then after a while I feel it's going to bang the side of my head off.
Seven hundred thousand people who have dementia in this country are not heard. I'm fortunate; I can be heard. Regrettably, it's amazing how people listen if you stand up in public and give away $1 million for research into the disease, as I have done.
I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.
You'd like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn't you, Comrade Sergeant?' said Reg encouragingly.
I think we are waiting for an e-book that even non-techies can be comfortable with. From my point of view, the biggest change is that I don't have to spend most of the day printing out and packaging a manuscript. I think I almost miss that.
Death was standing behind a lectern, poring over a map. He looked at Mort as if he wasn’t entirely there.
Do you understand what I'm saying?"
At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.
I believe it should be possible for someone stricken with a serious and ultimately fatal illness to choose to die peacefully with medical help, rather than suffer.
Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one.
It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen.
My programming language was solder.
No, I happen to be one of those people whose memory shuts down under pressure. The answers would come to me in the middle of the night in my sleep! Besides, I am a millionaire.
In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
It is said that your life flashes before your eyes before you die. That is true, it's called Life.
There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.
As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was.
Wikipedia, eh? Must be accurate then!
The air smelled of a limited life expectancy.
Life doesn't happen in chapters — at least, not regular ones. Nor do movies. Homer didn't write in chapters. I can see what their purpose is in children's books ("I'll read to the end of the chapter, and then you must go to sleep") but I'm blessed if I know what function they serve in books for adults.
The space between the young readers eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril.
Nerds are the only people who know how to operate the video recorder.
I keep vaguely wondering what Macs are like, but the ones I've seen spend too much time being friendly.
Never trust any complicated cocktail that remains perfectly clear until the last ingredient goes in, and then immediately clouds.
"Educational" refers to the process, not the object. Although, come to think of it, some of my teachers could easily have been replaced by a cheeseburger.
I don't like the place at all. It's all wrong. An imposition on the Landscape. I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
Astfgl sat back. He wondered what did happen to Lavaeoulus.
Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
WHAT IS IT CALLED WHEN YOU FEEL WARM AND CONTENT AND WISH THINGS WOULD STAY THAT WAY?
Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combatting the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?
There should be a notice ahead of the movie that says 'This movie is PG. Can you read? You are a Parent. Do you understand what Guidance is? Or are you just another stupid toddler who thinks they're an adult simply because they've grown older and, unfortunately, have developed fully-functioning sexual organs? Would you like some committee somewhere to decide *everything* for you? Get a damn grip, will you? And shut the wretched kid up !'
Oh, come on. Revelation was a mushroom dream that belonged in the Apocrypha. The New Testament is basically about what happened when God got religion
Time and space were, from Death's point of view, merely things that he'd heard described. When it came to Death, they ticked the box marked Not Applicable. It might help to think of the universe as a rubber sheet, or perhaps not.
What your soldier wants -- really, really wants -- is no-one shooting back at him.
A true beanie should have a propellor on the top.
I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.
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.
If you are going to write, say, fantasy - stop reading fantasy. You've already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you're going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit.
All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need...
I have to admit that I drive past Bridgwater quite regularly. And fast.
What you have here is an example of that well known phenomenon, A Bookshop Assistant Who Knows Buggerall But Won't Admit It (probably some kind of arts graduate).
I staggered into a Manchester bar late one night on a tour and the waitress said "You look as if you need a Screaming Orgasm". At the time this was the last thing on my mind...
I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
"Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged".
Freedom without limits is just a word.