Quotes

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

This isn't life in the fast lane, it's life in the oncoming traffic.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

If I heeded all the advice I've had over the years, I'ld have written 18 books about Rincewind.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Every procedure for getting a cat to take a pill works fine -- once.
Like the Borg, they learn...
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb--they're often students, for heaven's sake.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

I reckon that Stonehenge was build by the contemporary equivalent of Microsoft, whereas Avebury was definitely an Apple circle.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

I'm sure we can arrange an academic scholarship for Detritus. Troll cheerleaers would be nice: 'Two... four.... er.. many... lots'.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Baby orang-otans look like surprised coconuts.
-- Terry Pratchett

Mort isn't fashionable UK movie material -- there's no parts in it for Hugh or Emma, it's not set in Sheffield, and no one shoves drugs up their bum...
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

She wanted a holiday in Australia, she said, and if I turned it into work she'd hit me--so I gave in, because I did not want to be beaten about the Bush.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

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).
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"And then the world went mad. All right, madder."
-- Terry Pratchett (Pyramids)

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.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind."
-- Terry Pratchett

Tourist, Rincewind decided, meant "idiot".
-- Terry Pratchett ("The Colour of Magic")

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett (Hogfather)

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.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"In the Beginning there was nothing, which exploded."
-- Terry Pratchett (Lords and Ladies)

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness.
-- Terry Pratchett

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.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"Guilt was the grease in which the wheels of the authority turned."
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

That seems to point up a significant difference between Europeans and Americans. A European says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with me?" An American says: "I can't understand this, what's wrong with him?"
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

Don't you talk to me about progress. Progress just means bad things happen faster.
-- Terry Pratchett

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'.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

'He says gods like to see an atheist around. Gives them something to aim at.'
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

I try to make computers say things like "You have 60 seconds to achieve safe distance".
-- Terry Pratchett

I always call it 'Tour Flu', because two or three weeks in hot bookshops with hundreds of people usually produces an ailment of some kind. Going on tour is like a box of rare diseases--you never know what you're going to get.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

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.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

"A giant woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall building," sighed Dibbler.
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

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 presense.'
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

It wasn't a dark and stormy night. It should have been, but that's the weather for you.
-- Terry Pratchett (Good Omens)

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy, but they were listening in gibberish.
-- Terry Pratchett (Small Gods)

'If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.'
-- Terry Pratchett (concerning popcorn, Moving Pictures)

The duke had a mind that ticked like a clock and, like a clock, it regularly went cuckoo.
-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
-- Terry Pratchett

"See?" said the cat. "Give them an opposed thumb and they think they're something special."
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)

"He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat."
-- Terry Pratchett (Reaper Man)

AFPer: Terry, what the heck was going on at the end of Strata? I've just re-read the ending again and come up with another possible explanation which takes the total number into double figures.
TP: See? Other people would just have given you one or two. Amazing value, I think.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

It's an old magical principle -- it's even filtered down into RPG systems -- that magic, while taking a lot of effort, can be 'stored' -- in a staff, for example. No doubt a wizard spends a little time each day charging up his staff, although you go blind if you do it too much, of course.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

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.
-- Terry Pratchett (alt.fan.pratchett)

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.
-- Terry Pratchett

For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
-- Terry Pratchett

The singing wasn't particularly good. The only word the singer appeared to know was "la," but she was making it work hard.
-- Terry Pratchett (Wyrd Sisters)

The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
-- Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures)