Terry Pratchett Quotes

This time it had been magic. And it didn't stop being magic just because you found out how it was done.

This is a lovely party," said the Bursar to a chair, "I wish I was here.

The important thing about adventures, thought Mr. Bunnsy, was that they shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes.

I know loads of coppers and dealt with them a lot when I was a journalist - coppers are easy to write for; they tend to run on rails.

Granny Weatherwax, who had walked nightly without fear in the bandit-haunted forests of the mountains all her life in the certain knowledge that the darkness held nothing more terrible than she was.

There have been better attempts at marching, and they have been made by penguins.

(About sweeping).... What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends.

The significant owl hoots in the night.

And no practical definition of freedom would be complete without the freedom to take the consequences. Indeed, it is the freedom upon which all the others are based.

Vimes struggled to his feet, shook his head and set off after it. No thought was involved. It is the ancient instinct of terriers and policemen to chase anything that runs away.

You know what I'd really, really like? What I'd pay MONEY for? A ZX81 with a disc drive. I understood the ZX81. It was so easy to interface stuff to it.

We've got a lot of experience of not having any experience

I am death, not taxes. I turn up only once.

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.

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.

The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays.

It must be hard for humans, forever floundering through inconvenient geography. Humans are always lost. It's a basic characteristic. It explains a lot about them.

It is possible to live well with dementia and write best-sellers 'like wot I do.

Privilege (to the privileged) means having private laws.

Of course, just because we've heard a spine-chilling, blood-curdling scream of the sort to make your very marrow freeze in your bones doesn't automatically mean there's anything wrong.

One of the highlights of the first Good Omens tour was Neil and I walking through New York singing Shoehorn with Teeth. Well, we'd had a good breakfast. And you don't get mugged, either.

It wasn't that Nanny Ogg sang badly. It was just that she could hit notes which, when amplified by a tin bath half full of water, ceased to be sound and became some sort of invasive presence.

You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.

Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling 'banana', but didn't know how you stopped.

Vampires have risen from the dead, the grave, and the crypt, but have never managed it from the cat.

Some people believe that when you die, you cross the River of Death and have to pay the ferryman. People don’t seem to worry about that these days. Perhaps there’s a bridge now.

Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'.

As large as worlds. As old as Time. As patient as a brick.

Even if it's not your fault, it's your responsibility.

This looks like a job for inadvisably applied magic if ever I saw one.

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.

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

"Out of Print" is bookseller speak for "We can't be hedgehogged".

I have no use for people who have learned the limits of the possible.

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

I express preference for a chronological sequence of events which precludes a violence.

It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

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

Oh dear me, the Booker people don't like me. I don't care. I have been given an award for being taken not seriously, and I am very, very pleased about that.

If per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged.

People don't like to say Horror so they say Dark Fantasy because that's Horror wearing a collar and tie.

He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.

It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds.

Most of my schooldays were the worst day of my life.

The English were notoriously unenthusiastic about burning witches. I suppose ours were too soggy.

I wrote three books, I had three greenhouses. It seemed to me to be very satisfactory.

Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.

Most armies are in fact run by their sergeants - the officers are there just to give things a bit of tone and prevent warfare becoming a mere lower-class brawl.

If you try to to take my bananas from me, I will reclaim them from your cold dead hands.