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.
Interpretation
To create original work, diversify your influences and experiences beyond your primary genre.
Terry Pratchett's quote emphasizes the importance of broadening one's reading and cultural influences to foster creativity in writing, particularly in the fantasy genre. By consuming a variety of genres, authors can generate fresh ideas and avoid simply rehashing familiar tropes, leading to more innovative and engaging storytelling.
In practice
In a writing workshop, to inspire authors to explore new genres.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
Use anger to emotionalize whatever thing you intend to do in life - being a painter, a poet or a photographer
Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
I'm always interested in the spooky repurposing of everyday things.
The origins of poetry are clearly rooted in obscurity, in secretiveness, in incantation, in spells that must at once invoke and protect, tell the secret and keep it.
I was the female Marlon Brando of my generation.
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