Terry Pratchett

Somewhere around the place I've got an unfinished short story about Schrodinger's Dog; it was mostly moaning about all the attention the cat was getting.

I can see we're going to get along like a house on fire," said Miss Tick. "There may be no survivors.

If you trust in yourself. . .and believe in your dreams. . .and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.

I believe in reincarnation,” [Bjorn] said. I KNOW. “I tried to live a good life. Does that help?” THAT’S NOT UP TO ME. Death coughed. OF COURSE... SINCE YOU BELIEVE IN REINCARNATION... YOU’LL BE BJORN AGAIN.

That's one form of magic, of course." "What, just knowing things?" "Knowing things that other people don't know.

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

There are millions of chords. There are millions of numbers. And everyone forgets the one that is a zero. But without the zero, numbers are just arithmetic. Without the empty chord, music is just noise.

Tiffany has been apprenticing as a witch by visiting people in need with her mentor. After meeting with one particularly sad case, she tells her mentor, "It shouldn't be like this." Her mentor replies, "There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do.

(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.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn't theirs.

Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.

You're not going to tell me they built fifty-foot-high killer golems, are you?" "Only a man would think of that. It's our job," said Moist. "If you don't think of fifty-foot-high killer golems first, someone else will.

Getting an education was a bit like a communicable sexual disease. It made you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and then you had the urge to pass it on.

All assassins had a full-length mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed.

Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on who he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people.

There's no such thing as writer's block. That was invented by people in California who couldn't write.

Opera happens because a large number of things amazingly fail to go wrong.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.

He'd always known that the world was an interesting place, and his imagination had peopled it with pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts and similar. But he'd also had a nagging suspicion that, when you seriously got right down to it, they were all just things in books and didn't properly exist anymore.

What can the harvest hope for, if not for the care of the Reaper Man?