Quotes from Terry Pratchett

The shortest unit of time in the multiverse is the New York Second, defined as the period of time between the traffic lights turning green and the cab behind you honking.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

...no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

Life doesn't happen in chapters - at least, not regular ones.

Life is a trick, and you get one chance to learn it.

Her singing always cheered him up. Life seemed so much brighter when she stopped.

I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet.

And our lady friend, she thinks life works like a fairy tale.' Well, that's harmless, isn't it?' Yeah, but in fairy tales, when someone dies... it's just a word.

All the higher life forms scythed away, just like that. [ . . . ] Nothing but dust and fundamentalists.

The trouble with life was that you didn't get a chance to practice before doing it for real.

Journalism makes you think fast. You have to speak to people in all walks of life. Especially local journalism.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

When you're all singing together, it brings things together. I know the songs that my grandfather and my father sang.

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.

For an author, the nice characters aren't much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They're doing it for themselves.

The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

Freedom without limits is just a word.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

I became a journalist at 17. A few hours later, I saw my first dead body, which was somewhat... colourful. That's when I learned you can go on throwing up after you run out of things to throw up.

Everything happens for a reason, except possibly football. (in Thief of Time)

So much universe, and so little time.

Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.

Most gods find it hard to walk and think at the same time.