The short words are best, and the old words are the best of all.

It may happen sometimes that a long debate becomes the cause of a longer friendship. Commonly, those who dispute with one another at last agree.

Sometimes I’ve called writing a disease. If so, I’m glad that it caught me.

When I was young, an eccentric uncle decided to teach me how to lie. Not, he explained, because he wanted me to lie, but because he thought I should know how it’s done so I would recognise when I was being lied to.

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.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

The mouth obeys poorly when the heart murmurs.

Each day we understand better what the Indians say, and they us, so that very often we are intelligible to each other.

What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.

The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that oral teachers and sign teachers found it difficult to sit down in the same room without quarreling, and there was intolerance upon both sides. To say ‚oral method‘ to a sign teacher was like waving a red flag in the face of a bull, and to say ‚sign language‘ to an oralist aroused the deepest resentment.

He that hath knowledge spareth his words.

Smiles are the language of love.

It’s a very good question, very direct, and I’m not going to answer it.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.

The Internet has compromised the quality of debate.

I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.

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

Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write.

I am a professional sportswriter, among other things, and I take the games seriously. It is only one of my many powerful addictions, and I don’t mind admitting any of them.

He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

We’re not trying to make you less of a man. We just want you to love us as deeply and as wholesomely and as fully as we love you.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

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.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

I think I work much harder on the children’s books. I suppose I enjoy that. I find it interesting that although there are more than 30 books in the Discworld series, it is the four that were written for children which have won the awards. I’ve never been quite certain why this is.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Ever since Newton, we’ve done science by taking things apart to see how they work. What the computer enables us to do is to put things together to see how they work: we’re now synthesized rather than analysed. I find one of the most enthralling aspects of computers is limitless communication.

I could speak three languages when I was six, and when I went to school, I only liked to read and sketch. At five, I could write and everything.

Writing’s just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.

I undertake the same project as Montaigne, but with an aim contrary to his own: for he wrote his Essays only for others, and I write my reveries only for myself.

While working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or, rather, you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

The way I talk is bizarre.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

I think it does Discworld good if I don’t write about it all the time: sometimes you have to get it out of your system.

I don’t tell anyone how to write and no one tells me.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.

There is no waste of time in life like that of making explanations.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

When you really listen to another person from their point of view, and reflect back to them that understanding, it’s like giving them emotional oxygen.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

Why do I like to write short stories? Well, I certainly didn’t intend to. I was going to write a novel. And still! I still come up with ideas for novels. And I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up. I look at what I really want to do with the material, and it never turns out to be a novel.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

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.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.