Terry Pratchett Quotes

He was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.

A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

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.

This book was written using 100% recycled words.

[Science fiction is] out in the mainstream now. You can tell by the way mainstream literary authors pillage SF while denying they're writing it!

Noble dragons don't have friends. The nearest they can get to the idea is an enemy who is still alive.

If I were you, I'd sue my face for slander.

The figures looked more or less human. And they were engaged in religion. You could tell by the knives (it's not murder if you do it for a god).

No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should.

When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.

Creators aren't gods. They make places, which is quite hard. It's men that make gods. This explains a lot.

It's not lying when you do it to officers!

I commend my soul to any god that can find it.

Quick, someone's coming! Look real!

This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.

I’m not superstitious. I’m a witch. Witches aren’t superstitious. We are what people are superstitious of.

He helped the Librarian up. There was a red glow in the ape's eyes. It had tried to steal his books. This was probably the best proof any wizard could require that the trolleys were brainless.

Perhaps the magic would last, perhaps it wouldn't. But then again, what does?

We are here and it is now. The way I see it is, after that, everything tends towards guesswork.

...it is well known that a vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you're attempting can't be done.

Did I do anything last night that suggested I was sane?

If it wasn't for the fun and money, I really don't know why I'd bother.

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.

Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.

People who didn't need people needed people around to know that they were the kind of people who didn't need people.

Them as can do has to do for them as can't. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices.

It doesn't matter if dragons are flying overhead or whatever - a lot of Victoriana is still cut in the frame of fantasy.

The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.

"There's a door," he whispered. "Where does it go?" "It stays where it is, I think," said Rincewind.

Everything starts somewhere, although many physicists disagree.

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.

That's the Ankh-Morpork instinct, Vimes thought. Run away, and then stop and see if anything interesting is going to happen to other people.

It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military maneuvers, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of.

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.

The three rules of the Librarians of Time and Space are: 1) Silence; 2) Books must be returned by no later than the date shown; and 3) Do not interfere with the nature of causality.

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.

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.

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.

When millions of tons of angry elephant come spinning through the sky, and there was no one there to hear it, does it - philosopically speaking - make a noise

Ninety percent of most magic merely consists of knowing one extra fact.

So much universe, and so little time.

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

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.

I mean, I wouldn't pay more than a couple of quid to see me, and I'm me.

You can't find a hermit to teach you herming, because of course that rather spoils the whole thing.

I used to think that I was stupid, and then I met philosophers.

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.

Botswana is also the only country in the world with a colour in its flag meant to represent rain (a sort of blue-grey). Not many people know this.

The brain works fast when it thinks it’s about to be cut in half.