I’m half living my life between reality and fantasy at all times.

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‚The Colour of Magic‘ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‚The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.‘

A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.

I’ve got a feeling that music might not be the most interesting place to be in the world of things.

It’s lack that gives us inspiration. It’s not fullness.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

The devil has put a penalty on all things we enjoy in life. Either we suffer in health or we suffer in soul or we get fat.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

We were born to die and we die to live. As seedlings of God, we barely blossom on earth; we fully flower in heaven.

I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

We should not look at terrorism from the nameplates – which group they belong to, what is their geographical location, who are the victims. These individual groups or names will keep changing.

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

The child inside of you knows how to take things as they come, how to deal most effectively and happily with everything and everyone it encounters on this planet. If you can recapture that childlike essence of your being, you can stay ‚forever young at heart.‘

Kids will remind you that, even though you’ve gone down a road 100 times, it’s brand new for them – and that’s healthy.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That’s always been the easy way. It’s not that it’s so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it’s just that there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.

Fame will go by and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experience, but that’s not where I live.

I should like to save the Shire, if I could – though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them.

Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power to that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

You will always have partial points of view, and you’ll always have the story behind the story that hasn’t come out yet. And any form of journalism you’re involved with is going to be up against a biased viewpoint and partial knowledge.

Imagination decides everything.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

The first step, my son, which one makes in the world, is the one on which depends the rest of our days.

While there’s life, there’s hope.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.

There is no unique picture of reality.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.

Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.

Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neurone disease. But it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I could still do.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

When I was five, I think, that’s when I started wanting to be an actress. I loved to play. I didn’t like the world around me because it was kind of grim, but I loved to play house. It was like you could make your own boundaries.

If he have faith, the believer cannot be restrained. He betrays himself. He breaks out. He confesses and teaches this gospel to the people at the risk of life itself.

I never think about myself as an artist working in this time. I think about it in macro.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

Europe has what we do not have yet, a sense of the mysterious and inexorable limits of life, a sense, in a word, of tragedy. And we have what they sorely need: a sense of life’s possibilities.

The great quest of life has always been to discover truth.

No one even knows one percent of the fabulous history of Man; but thanks to history, we know about occurrences that go beyond the limits of the imaginable.

There is no security on this earth; there is only opportunity.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

Our life is made by the death of others.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

You always admire what you really don’t understand.

The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.

A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.