Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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?
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I grow as many of our vegetables as I can, because my granddad was a professional gardener, and it's in the blood.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

He was the sort of person who stood on mountaintops during thunderstorms in wet copper armour shouting 'All the Gods are bastards.'
Terry Pratchett

Personally, I think the best motto for an educational establishment is: 'Or Would You Rather Be a Mule?'
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

Nothing I can say or devise, and nothing anybody else can say or devise, is going to be perfect.
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

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

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.'
Terry Pratchett

I'm glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
Terry Pratchett

I like being a writer.
Terry Pratchett

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I have a living will and I have friends, and I have money and I have hope.
Terry Pratchett

I don't think about the end game. I've got lots to occupy my mind. It's the rage that keeps me going.
Terry Pratchett

Freedom without limits is just a word.
Terry Pratchett

I have, before now, waited for a pen to perform a macro.
Terry Pratchett

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
Terry Pratchett

Sooner or later we're all someone's dog.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

'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.
Terry Pratchett

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.
Terry Pratchett

If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
Terry Pratchett

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

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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'?
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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

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.
Terry Pratchett

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'.
Terry Pratchett

I am a great fan of science, but I cannot do a quadratic equation.
Terry Pratchett

It's useful to go out of this world and see it from the perspective of another one.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I've often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I don't believe in the war god of the Israelites. He's a bogeyman. Jesus preached the golden rule, by and large.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

I think the best thing I ever did with my life was stand up and say I've got Alzheimer's.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett

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.
Terry Pratchett