3,122 Quotes by Terry Pratchett

I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go.

Once you've ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right. There was also the curious incident of the orangutan in the night-time.

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

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.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

One day all of us will die but - and this is the important thing - we are not dead yet.

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

Well, yes, but it's not about the football." "You're saying that football is not about football?" "It's the sharing," she said. "It's being part of the crowd. It's chanting together. It's all of it. the whole thing.