All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

Courage that grows from constitution often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty acts; in a uniform manner.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

To do a great right do a little wrong.

Patience is not simply the ability to wait – it’s how we behave while we’re waiting.

When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them.

Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.

I was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.

On ‚Think Like a Man,‘ they got the best out of me because they allowed me to bring my own cadences and opinions to the character that I was playing. I think we got the best of that particular character.

Character develops itself in the stream of life.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

I was warped early by Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe. I was very fond of Franz Kafka.

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.

For me, a paragraph in a novel is a bit like a line in a poem. It has its own shape, its own music, its own integrity.

Digital technology allows us a much larger scope to tell stories that were pretty much the grounds of the literary media.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottage princes‘ palaces.

I think the definition of a book is changing.

I don’t do Shakespeare. I don’t talk in that kind of broken English.

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and – since there is no other metaphor – also the soul.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

Burroughs is crap. Crap.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

Character isn’t something you were born with and can’t change, like your fingerprints. It’s something you weren’t born with and must take responsibility for forming.

Erudition – that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic – is taught in the schools; but where is the more important quality, character, taught? Nowhere in particular. There is no authorized training for children in character.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

The formation of one’s character ought to be everyone’s chief aim.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

When we see persons of worth, we should think of equaling them; when we see persons of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

I grew up reading science fiction.

My literature is much more the result of a paradox than that of an implacable logic, typical of police novels. The paradox is the tension that exists in my soul.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

If you had a million Shakespeares, could they write like a monkey?

I rewrote the ending to ‚Farewell to Arms,‘ the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.