‚Discworld‘ is taking something that you know is ridiculous and treating it as if it is serious, to see if something interesting happens when you do so.

Trash talk? Smack talk? This is an American term that makes me laugh. I simply speak the truth. I’m an Irish man.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.

‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

Eight years involved with the nuclear industry have taught me that when nothing can possible go wrong and every avenue has been covered, then is the time to buy a house on the next continent.

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.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

The thing about fantasy – there are certain things you just don’t do in fantasy.

Good jokes are gems. A good idea is hard to come by. I couldn’t give them to someone else, even for money. It just wouldn’t seem right.

Tolkien is eminently filmable, I think. ‚The Lord of the Rings‘ is intensely… landscaped. But ‚Discworld‘ is about dialogue, which is one reason why it might be hard to film.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.

Marriage has no guarantees. If that’s what you’re looking for, go live with a car battery.

I seem to turn out stories that violate the discipline of the short story form and don’t obey the rules of progression for novels. I don’t think about a particular form: I think more about fiction, let’s say a chunk of fiction.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

If you are not allowed to laugh in heaven, I don’t want to go there.

I don’t think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

If you can’t make it better, you can laugh at it.

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.

I’ve been in love with the same woman for forty-one years. If my wife finds out, she’ll kill me.

Some sarcasm is best told simply.

You know those things that you throw the twigs into and it spits them out? That’s what I do. The branches are like life, and I throw them into my head and some of it comes out as humor.

Shakespeare didn’t work at all for me.

I’m looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody.

Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.

She laughs at everything you say. Why? Because she has fine teeth.

This man is frank and earnest with women. In Fresno, he’s Frank and in Chicago he’s Ernest.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

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

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot.

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Science and fiction both begin with similar questions: What if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth.

Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!

It’s easy being a humorist when you’ve got the whole government working for you.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

I am not a fan of books.

Charlotte Bronte was writing about sex. I supposed Jane Austen was, too. Where do you get a hero like Darcy unless you are writing about sex?

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

Men show their character in nothing more clearly than what they think laughable.

I’ve just always been a reader.

I don’t think I’ve ever read poetry, ever. I’m not really book-smart.

Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Whoever named it necking was a poor judge of anatomy.

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.