"I decided at school that the only sensible way to make a living by arranging words in a pleasing order was by working on newspapers, because you got paid at the end of the week or the end of the month."
Quote collection
Terry Pratchett quotes (page 33 of 72)
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"I have a suspicion - I have to be careful what I say - that you might actually find the best comics actually written by people who are comics writers and who aren't setting out to do graphic novels."
"There has been a lot of bad fantasy in the past - I'm by no means saying that all classic fantasy out there is bad - but there has been a lot of bad fantasy written by people who read a lot of fantasy and so all they keep doing is recycling it."
"Shoot the dictator and prevent the war? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge; shoot him and there'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? Why not shoot everyone and invade Poland?"
"I think what drove me away from being a reporter was an inability to accept that the world came in neat stories. Every story you have to report is just part of something bigger. The news isn't what happened last night - it's some cumulative thing that's happened over centuries. I found it hard to think of one event and drag it out of a bubbling pot and present it as the story that explains it all."
"Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies."
"Despite rumor, Death isn't cruel--merely terribly, terribly good at his job."
"His movements could be called cat-like, except that he did not stop to spray urine up against things."
"Do you know how wizards like to be buried?" "Yes!" "Well, how?" Granny Weatherwax paused at the bottom of the stairs. "Reluctantly."
"This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around."
"You have to start out learning to believe the little lies. "So we can believe the big ones?" Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing."
"Young man, the games we play are lessons we learn. The assumptions we make, things we ignore, and things we change make us what we become."
"What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?"
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man I put away childish things because. wow, then I could afford much *better* childish things!"
"The important thing about adventures, thought Mr. Bunnsy, was that they shouldn't be so long as to make you miss mealtimes."
"She'd become a governess. It was one of the few jobs a known lady could do. And she'd taken to it well. She'd sworn that if she did indeed ever find herself dancing on rooftops with chimney sweeps she'd beat herself to death with her own umbrella."
"They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and coordination of a deck-chair."
"Anyway, if you stop tellin' people it's all sorted out afer they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive."
"You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?"
"The Chain Letter to the Ephebians. Forget Your Gods. Be Subjugated. Learn to Fear. Do not break the chain -- the last people who did woke up one morning to find fifty thousand armed men on their lawn."