Quote collection
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"The point of page one is to make people turn to page two and if at the end of the book people think that the book was good value for money, you have achieved something, because if you haven't achieved those things you're not going to achieve the other thing."
"I can't stand any music that requires its singers to be so dumb they wear their baseball caps backwards."
"I would advise budding writers some other kind of job, unless they think they're very, very lucky."
"No one thinks that young adults read hooks for YOUNG ADULTS, books for young adults are read by kids."
"I don't think a baker reads an awful lot about bread."
"A police procedural novel can be even funnier if the police include Trolls and Dwarves and things like that. You start looking at the whole basis of the cop novel. You get the cop moving in a different way when you've actually set it in a fantasy city."
"There are some things that are more appropriate to a children's than an adult book but there's a huge overlapping area and most kids read an age group up anyway."
"The diplomatic thing for me to say is that if publishers are dressing up other authors as Terry Pratchett clones then they are doing a disservice to those authors. If they didn't dress them as clones but did something different, then those authors could be pioneering in a different sense."
"Maybe the best comics are written by people who really are at ease in the comic world."
"I mistrust the term graphic novel because it sounds like a good thing to put on a tee-shirt. That's why the French like them."
"I'd like to sell a lot of books."
"A hardback's harder at Christmas time because that's a good hardback buying time."
"My agent pointed out one day that I had been quoted by a columnist in some American newspaper, and he noted with some glee that they simply identified me by name without reminding people who I was, apparently in the clear expectation that their readers would know who I am."
"Sometimes I feel that the world is made up of sensible people who know the plot and bloody idiots who don't."
"Once you have your character sitting right there in your head, all you really need to do is wind them up, put them down, and simply write down what they do, say, or think."
"The author can always delve into his own personality and find aspects of himself with which he can dress his characters."
"Sometimes you can think that 'I've had enough of wizards!' And sometimes fantasy is not just about wizards."
"In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice."
"Certainly I have no faith in Jehovah, although I think it quite likely that Jesus Christ, as a preacher and a wise man, did indeed exist."
"It's actually true that I keep myself going by constantly promising myself that in response for the hard work I will be allowed to do some more hard work later on."